Are you terribly slow at writing blog posts? Do you struggle with perfectionism and toil over a blank page for hours?
Don’t worry, I was the exact same way. I was never a great writer, but I knew that it was important to write blog posts quickly to be successful.
That’s why I created a method that anyone can follow which will not only speed up your blog writing but also maintain the quality.
Read on to learn about 7 tips that will help you write blog posts faster and publish more content.
Reasons You Should Know How to Write Blog Posts Faster
In blogging, speed is of the essence. Most people produce blogs for money. Whether that’s money as a freelancer where other people pay you for writing, or money coming from your own site, the end goal is to get paid.
It’s important to put things in perspective when you’re trying to get paid for writing blog posts. As a freelancer, the time that you spend writing an article for one site could be spent writing for another site – therefore making more money.
If you are trying to publish articles for your site, you must publish enough to get ranked.
Either way, the longer you spend on the blog post, the longer it will take for you to get paid.
It’s important to put the time spent on writing into perspective. Let’s say it takes you 4 hours on average to write a blog post. Like most people who write blogs, you probably have a day job on the side + family responsibilities, healthy living etc. Altogether, you can probably only dedicate 20 hours to writing per week. This comes out to 80 hours per month.
80 hours per month / 4 hours per blog post comes out to 20 articles per month.
240 articles if probably enough articles for you to create a fully functioning affiliate marketing site that makes you enough income to support you full-time. That sounds pretty good! But keep in mind that means cranking out articles like a machine every morning night and weekend for a year.
It’s more likely that you won’t be 100% efficient, some articles will be longer and will take longer to write, life issues will come up, holiday season’s are taken into account etc.
The reality is that it writing time is highly valuable and should be maximized as much as possible. If you only speed up your writing speed by 10%, you would be able to get to your 240-article target in a month and a half less time (or produce 24 more blog posts in a year, or get paid 10% more from your freelancing – whatever way you want to slice it)
At the end of the day, its obvious how writing faster will make you more money and free up more of your time to do hobbies or spend time with your family. So with that, let’s get into it some the top ways to write blogs faster.
7 Ways to Write Blog Posts Faster
Learning to write blog posts faster does not come from one big fix. Rather, speed writing is possible by following a methodology and adding many different strategies together.
Here are the 7 most effective ways that I have discovered to write blog posts faster:
1. Follow a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
One of the best ways that you can speed up your writing is by creating a standard operating procedure (SOP) for yourself and following it.
How you structure your SOP is really up to you, but it will typically include a step-by-step process with each step described in detail. For example, my blog writing SOP goes something like this:
- Do keyword research
- Create an outline
- Write the first draft
- Upload onto the website
- Add images
- Proofread
- Publish
When you break up your writing process like this into steps, it becomes easier to complete each step sequentially instead of feeling overwhelmed. Additionally, each step can be broken down further to be more efficient.
2. Write Quickly and Edit Later
Having the right mentality is very important for writing blog posts quickly. You have to develop a “write first, edit later” mindset for speed writing. This is because your brain thinks about writing and editing differently.
When you switch back and forth between writing and editing mode, your brain has to switch gears. Switching gears slows down your writing because you’re constantly adjusting and second-guessing what you just wrote.
Instead, you want to just get words down on your page so you have something to work with.
If you are like me, it’s hard to just write without going back and editing every sentence. However, this mindset shift can be adopted.
One trick that I used for years to speed up my writing was to add the words “Shitty First Draft” to the top of the document. This is a well-known trick popularized by Anne Lamott in her book on writing named Bird-by-bird. Check out her thoughts on the shitty first draft technique here.
When you commit to writing a “draft” as opposed to a finished product, your brain will start to relax into writing mode and allow the words to flow out onto the document.
3. Create a Publishing Schedule
A publishing schedule is an important piece of the speed blog writing process. When you create an official publishing schedule, it holds you accountable for a timeframe. This makes time paramount in your writing process.
If you have to publish a blog post by the end of the week come hell or high water, you will find a way to get it done.
Your publishing schedule doesn’t have to be fancy, it could be a simple spreadsheet that outlines how many articles you need to write and by what timeframe they need to be completed.
The publishing timeline should be reasonable but challenging so you are pushed to write efficiently. Over time, you can add increasing levels of content into the schedule as your writing progressively speeds up.
Ultimately, a publishing schedule holds you accountable and takes you from being a casual writer to a professional level.
4. Write Like You Are Speaking to a Friend
In blog writing, there is a certain style that is expected by the common reader. This style is less like writing a research paper and more like you are speaking to a friend.
While many people struggle with “writing” in a clear and concise format, most people don’t have trouble teaching a friend something new. I struggled for a long time with this because I was always trying to write fancy instead of just spitting it out.
As it turns out, 54% of American adults have literacy capabilities below a 6th-grade level. Keep this in mind as you publish content online. Even for your more literate audience members, it can become exhausting to read complicated sentences.
Write blog posts faster by explaining concepts in simple words – like your friend is asking for advice on something you know a lot about.
5. Use Writing Software
Gone are the days of clickity clacking on a typewriter. We live in a technology-rich age where there are more than enough tools to help with the writing process. You can dramatically speed up your writing by utilizing them.
Here are some of the best tools for writing blog posts quickly:
Grammarly
Grammarly is a free spellcheck tool that allows you to fix spelling mistakes quickly and easily. it works by underlining incorrectly spelled words and fixing them with a click of the mouse. This makes it super easy to write without worrying about spelling mistakes – you can fix them simply and easily after you get your initial thoughts down.
Grammarly also makes suggestions for sentence structure and wording that can help speed up your writing even more.
Jasper.ai
Jasper.ai is an artificial intelligence-powered writing assistant that can help you write blog posts faster. It uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyze your text and make recommendations on how to improve it, from grammar and spelling corrections to more complex changes like sentence structure or word choice.
It has a ton of very powerful functions that involve writing and editing text. While I don’t recommend using AI tools to write entire articles, I find that Jasper.ai can really help get the writing juices flowing.
With its help, you can get text onto the document that makes sense and helps answer the search intent of the article – at the end of the day, this is all that matters.
SurferSEO
Most blogs are written to rank on search engines. SurferSEO is a tool that helps you write articles that include target keywords and answer the reader’s search intent.
SurferSEO analyses the top pages that are ranking for your target keyword and makes suggestions to help you outrank existing articles. These suggestions include things like keyword density, number of headers, images, article length, and more.
Having a tool like SurferSEO tell you how to optimize an article for search engines speeds up your writing because it takes the guesswork out of the process. One of the best parts about it is that it integrates directly into Jasper.ai – combining the power of both tools!
YoastSEO
YoastSEO is a great free tool for new blog writers. It makes generic suggestions for your writing to make it more optimized for search results – it’s kind of like a more rudimentary version of SurferSEO.
YoastSEO has a very useful WordPress plugin that can help you craft your metadata on articles before publishing. When I first started blogging, I learned a ton from YoastSEO about how to structure and publish articles to rank on Google. Nowadays, I use other tools such as SurferSEO for optimization but still use YoastSEO for inputting metadata.
6. Improve your Typing Speed
This one is kind of obvious but I had to include it. If you can speed up your typing speed, you can literally get your ideas onto your document faster.
Training courses can really help improve your typing speed by drilling proper typing techniques. But if you’re looking for a quick gain right now, here are a few tips to get you typing faster:
- Don’t look at your keyboard – the more you can train yourself to not look at the keyboard, the faster you can type. This is a psychological thing – force yourself to look at the screen while you type. Once you practice doing this for a while, it becomes second nature.
- Focus on accuracy first and speed second – this seems antithetical to the goal of writing faster, but it will make a big difference in your typing speed over time. It takes a long time to go back and fix typos. Therefore, if you get really good at not messing up, your typing speed will naturally increase.
- Sit up straight – When you sit down to write, assume a strong upright posture with your feet flat on the floor. A strong posture will place your hands in the right position and allow your fingers to glide across the keyboard. It also sends a signal to your body to let it know that you have a job to do and it’s time to get it done.
7. Create a Writing Habit
Blogging is not a quick sprint. It is a long marathon no matter how you approach it. In order to write blog posts faster, you have to be in it for the long haul.
It is much easier to write a blog post a day than it is to write 5 blog posts in one day. Trust me, I have tried to write for 8 – 10 hours straight and it is extremely hard to keep your mind engaged enough to produce quality work with that strategy.
Instead, the efficient production of blog posts comes from a habitual writing approach. you can do this by committing to writing a little bit every day for an extended period. This means sitting down to write in the same place at the same time repeatedly.
Doing the same thing repeatedly for 30 days straight will make it a habit. Once you have a habit formed in your life, it will feel weird to not write. You will find yourself automatically sitting down at the computer and pumping out articles.
As you can imagine, a writing habit allows you to write faster and produce much more content over the long term when compared to sprinting and burning out repeatedly.
Additional Pointers: How to Speed Write a Blog Post Like A Pro
Once you have implemented the 7 ways to produce blog posts faster listed above, it’s time to take it to the next level. To start producing content at a high level, you have to create processes.
Processes separate the casuals from the pros. Think Henry Ford implementing the assembly line process in his factories. Think of Japanese manufacturers implementing Lean processes in the 1980s.
Processes allow you to scale your production. So if you want to write blog posts faster, you’ll have to start looking at it like an assembly line.
One of the key tenets of assembly lines is batching. Batching involves doing each step of your process independently and repeatedly. This allows you to save switchover time from one task to another. Over the long term, you will save tons of time and ultimately get more done.
For example, instead of doing keyword research for one article, you should do keyword research for 10 or 20 articles at a time. This will speed up the time that it takes to do the research and also the time that it takes to choose a topic and start writing – it’s a double whammy!
Use efficiency principles like batching and approach your blog writing like an assembly line to save time and massively speed up your writing.
Summary and My Experience with Writing Blog Posts Quickly
Writing blog posts is a skill like any other skill – the more you do it, the better you become. If you’re just starting out, make sure you get the basics down before trying to write at lightning speed. But if you’ve been doing this for a while, challenge yourself to write faster.
Hopefully, these tips have given you a framework to write faster while keeping the quality of your article intact. At the end of the day, writing is a mental activity. You can make the biggest strides in your writing speed by focusing on the task at hand.
With that, get out there and write up a storm!
