If you run a blog, you know that content is the lifeblood of your website. Unless you constantly push out content, you’ll never be able to gain any traction. Articles are an investment – an asset that can continue to provide income for years as your blog becomes more popular.
Not to mention, search engines love fresh content and will reward you with higher rankings in the search results.
But hey, you’re only one person, right? Unless you pay writers, you are the single source of that high quality content. Here’s the problem though: If you run a personal blog, and even if you have the money, you likely don’t buy content because it won’t reflect your writing style and what your readers have come to expect.
So yeah, it’s pretty much all down to you.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t leverage your precious time a little better. Here are a few ways that I consistently crank out more content:
I write several articles simultaneously.
When I’m writing a single article, I usually reach a point where I get stuck. If I continue, the writing suffers and isn’t up to par. I’ll write myself into a corner; not sure why that is. The solution for me is to step away and come back. When I do that, I’ve always got a fresh perspective.
Taking a break is essential for good content. The problem is that it’s usually unproductive and can turn into hours of idle time if you aren’t careful.
In the past, I’d take a few minutes to stretch and regroup before going back to the article. Sometimes that break also involved surfing the web a little. The problem was that I’d get severely side-tracked – especially if I starting watching Youtube videos. The algorithm knows what you like and will temp you with similar videos on the side of your screen. The problem is that eventually you’ll be watching Russian road rage videos while you started out watching a video on the James Webb Space Telescope. Honestly, how does that happen?
That time was a total waste – a total loss to my business. To stay productive, I needed another approach – and that’s when I started writing multiple articles. I’d think of at least 3 unrelated topics and start an article for each topic. When I reached the point of fatigue on one, I’d select another I had on a different tab.
The break from one article to the other is enough to get that fresh perspective if you’ve written yourself into a corner. As a bonus, you’re now getting more content written instead of wasting your precious time.
If you do this, make sure the articles are about completely unrelated topics; the idea is to totally disengage from what you’re doing and go to something entirely different. In a sense, you are giving your brain a vacation from one topic as you concentrate on another.
Once I return to the article, I feel refreshed, even though I didn’t actually stop writing. Try this and you’ll see what I mean.
Okay, so another way to increase your productivity is to pick out a piece of your article that can be turned into its own article
Sometimes you get writing on a certain sub topic within the post and it just makes much more sense to keep it brief and give the topic its own separate article if there’s too much to say about it. Try to do this in the moment by opening a new page and writing about the sub topic while it’s fresh in your head. I find that they usually write themselves since you’re already thinking about it. The original article isn’t going anywhere and you’ll get back to it. Before you know it, you have 2 articles and it feels like you spent the energy to write one.
Similarly, If you get off on a tangent and the paragraph doesn’t fit with the rest of the post, don’t delete it, just cut it out and make it the subject of your new article. Bam, another article with minimal effort!
Don’t go for perfection right away
I know, we all want to write a great article that really connects with readers. We want to make sure spelling and grammar are 100% and that it flows logically. But that will come with revision. For a first draft, just write – everything is editable.
Make sure you take a break between revisions. I like to take a day or so for more important articles, and when I go back to revise, I aways catch mistakes or I notice ways to improve what I’m saying. Another tip: Read it out loud and you’ll get a better feel for how it sounds.
Learn to type
Lastly, learning to touch type will make so much difference, especially if you deal in a fairly high volume of articles. It is painful to sit there and peck away with 2 fingers for any more than a single blog post. Sure, you could argue that learning to touch type is more painful than trying to write articles using the “hunt-and-peck” method, but over time, and as you gain speed and accuracy, the benefits are going to shine.
