One of the keys to building a successful blog is to publish frequently and on a regular basis. In most cases this means writing a new blog post at least 4 or 5 times a week. You’ll be writing a lot of other articles, too, for guest blogging purposes, article marketing, and other off site promotional purposes. As you can see, there’s a lot of writing involved in blogging. Here are fives teps to write effective articles in less times.
Eliminate all distractions
When it’s time to write, it’s time to write. Turn off the television, shut down Facebook, turn off all alerts, close your email and turn off all your different chat programs. It helps to set aside a specific time each day just for writing and completely block out all other distractions.
Use a word processing program
It might seem like it would save time to write you blog posts or articles right there on the dashboard but it’s really a distraction. You’re tempted to format and edit while you’re writing and that breaks your concentration.
Instead, do your writing in a word processing program. You can download Open Office for free if your computer doesn’t have Word. When you’re writing in a word processing program you can add your relevant links as you go,too, which saves another step later on.
There’s another benefit here, too. With one click you can save your blog post or article to a file. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been writing along in whatever blogging platform I’m using and it crashed or burped and I lost everything. Write in a separate program, save it to your hard drive, and then just copy and paste into your blog.
Write your title first
You’ll see this tip a lot when I’m talking about writing because I think it’s one of the most important things you can do to make your blog posts better. Writing your title first gives you a clear idea of what you want to say and what keyword your need to focus on.
Too many bloggers start writing first, rambling all over the page. They never deliver a clear, concise message and their titles rarely reflect their content. This makes it difficult for your readers to understand what you’re trying to say and it’s not good for your SEO, either,.
Write like there’s no tomorrow
Sit down and start writing and write like there’s no tomorrow. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar errors, or headers and bullet points. Just write. Get your message on the page, in an orderly fashion, and then go back to edit and format.
Stopping to edit while you’re writing is distracting. You forget what you were going to say next so you have to go back to the beginning and re-read everything. By the time you finally get done writing you’ve re-read your article 10 or 20 times.
Edit, format and publish
Now that you have all your thoughts on the page, go back and do your editing. You’ll only have to do it once, which saves time.
In the beginning, it’s going to be hard to make these changes. You might even get writer’s blog for the first day or two. But once you see how much more you accomplish in a much shorter span of time, you’ll be glad you eliminated all the distractions and got down to the business of writing.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!