The process of writing is undoubtedly a bit complicated. Expressing one’s thoughts and feelings through letters and words is not an easy task for anyone. There are so many authors, novelists, and poets who spend most of their time in search of just a single flash of an idea. For bloggers I must say, it is all the more hard. Poets and novelists can still write from their imagination. But from bloggers, we have much more expectations. We expect them to write authentic, unimaginitive and hardcore real facts. Besides, we also expect consistency from them. This puts them under tremendous pressure to meet deadlines, while maintaining a high quality writing approach.
No matter how much professional a blogger is, he/she does have many other engagements in their day to day life. This makes their schedule extremely busy and has an adverse impact on their writing. Their writing quality diminishes, consistency gets hampered and eventually their fan following wanes out.
So if you are starting off as a blogger, this post might come to your help. In this post, you would learn how to make use of your time, and write more high quality blogs in very less time. The tips are very easy and don’t demand any craftiness.
Let’s start; there’s no time to waste!
1. Have a list of post ideas at the ready
William Somerset Maugham once said, “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” Well, his ideas used to strike at nine. But yours might strike at 12 midnight. Doesn’t matter. Whenever an idea strikes you, materialize it. Because keeping your ideas stored beforehand, is always better than staring at a blank screen in search of an idea.
There’s nothing much to do, just pen down a list of 20-30 post ideas to save your time. Maybe they are crude, but you can fine tune later when you finally sit to write. Doing this can alone save you by slashing your writing time by almost 20%.
2. Use Templates
Shun all those ‘unnecessary’ thinkings while writing a blog post. How to reduce the amount of unnecessary thought process? One good way is to use checklists or templates. By template I do not mean the generic templates found online. Create your own creative template designed with your original ideas that you can customize as needed.
Create a template for everything; from your editorial calendar to your actual blog post. This will make you write more blogs in less time, and also leverage the quality of your writing because half of the work is getting done before hand.
3. Write now, edit later
Editing is that near to final process when you fine tune your messy draft and produce it to the world. However, editing has always been a later part in the process of writing.
If you are serious about writing and not letting your time to waste, then you must not go back to each and every sentence and edit it. Well, I agree that some do this, but what point is in editing and correcting something that could be done later on also! Productive writers first focus on their first crude draft, get it completed. And when it is done, then they concentrate on editing the draft.
If you stop at each sentence to tweak and polish it, it will take an entire day for you to complete just one blog. Do not ever commit this mistake if you want to save your time.
4. Write Shorter Posts
What are your criteria for a blog? Quantity, or Quality? If it happens to be the latter, then write shorter posts.
A lot of speculations have been done on the theory of longer posts over shorter ones. Even Google tend to favor longer posts. However, at the end of the day, a blogger’s prime motto is to feed his followers with some value through his blog. And of course, many readers do prefer shorter posts as long as they provide a good value to them.
A pro tip for you. Write longer posts often, and in between write the shorter ones that take up less time`. That way your deadline would be met, you would be consistent, and Google would be satisfied too with your longer posts.
5. Forget about being perfect
Do not write for the grammar Nazis. They are anyway not going to praise you or give you any productive advice. So don’t focus on perfect literature. But yes, this doesn’t mean that you can get away with any typo, major grammatical errors or any other notable fallacy. As long as you are clean of not committing these grave mistakes, go on with your colloquial English. After all, writing should be such that each and everyone understands it.
And it goes without saying that the web gives us the flexibility of fixing any error later also.
6. Set a timer
Train yourself to be on the clock. And also place a boundary on the flow of your writing so that it doesn’t turn up to be a lengthy post.
You may set an alarm of, say, thirty minutes. Write your post without stopping to any distraction or any random thoughts. Work on it till the buzzer sounds. This half an hour window will force you to achieve more in less time. Also if you can go an extra mile of putting a word count restriction on yourself, you would do yourself a benefit.
7. Stop writing
You read that correct. Stop writing. Just don’t write. Go and eat, drink, sleep, meditate, work out, or anything but don’t write!
Yes, this does sound crazy, but there are days when you are blocked, your thinking cap has worn out, your list of ideas has ended, and you are totally short for ideas. In those days don’t coerce or push yourself to write. You will end up with a trash instead! Don’t burn yourself out.
Rather do whatever you want to, and when you get back that rejuvenated persona, creep back to your desk and turn on the computer. Relax and open your word processor and start writing. Trust me, that day you would produce the best blog of your life!
Each of us possesses a unique writing style and process. But more often people tend to succumb to external pressures, and thus hamper their writing talent. To produce a successful blog, you don’t need to spend all your day on it. You just need to figure out the scientific method of using your time and energy in a more productive way. And these tips would surely help you to achieve it.
Do you have any other tip to add? Please feel free to share the same with us. We would be happy to mention it on our blog.
Start writing now… The clock is ticking!