I talk to a lot of people about blogging. One of the most common questions I get is, “Ray, how do you manage to write a blog post every single day?”
It's a good question. I believe that writing frequently and consistently is key to your blogging success. A few months ago I committed to writing daily as an experiment, to see what the practice would yield. I won't share the detailed results in this post, but I will say it has been well worth the effort, and I plan to continue.
Here are my best tips on how to manage writing a blog post every day:
Write in batches. It's rare for me to write a single blog post at a time. Instead, I schedule a block of time (usually an hour or more), and write several blog posts in a row. This may not work for everyone, but it works for me. Once I'm in the flow of writing, it's better for me to keep on writing.
Write shorter posts. The best reason for writing shorter posts is very straightforward: people read them. I've carefully observed the activity on this blog and noted that when I write longer posts I get fewer reactions. So I know for certain that my readers prefer it when I write shorter posts. This has the advantage of allowing me to write more of them–making it easier to write something every day.
Keep a list of possible titles. I have a text file on my desktop that contains nothing but blog post title ideas. I get these ideas from a variety of sources: magazine covers, book titles, intriguing phrases I encounter when I'm reading, questions that I get via e-mail or this blog, and from other blogs I read. I capture these ideas when I'm on the go by entering them into Omnifocus on my iPhone, which automatically synchronizes with my MacBook Pro. Having this list of titles makes it easy to write when those scheduled blocks of writing time come up on my calendar. I'm never sitting at the keyboard wondering, “What shall I write about?”
Stay one week ahead. While I am not perfect at this, I do my best to stay a full week ahead in my post writing. This gives me the advantage of being able to write something topical if I want, but never being “squeezed” by deadlines. At times, I'm as much as 14 days ahead of schedule. This relieves a great deal of stress in my writing life.
Those are a few of the tips that allow me to produce a blog post every day.
And just in case you think one post a day is impressive… while I was writing this post, I found an article by Chris Brogan on how to write three blog posts a day. As a writer, I'm always interested in what other writers have to say about this subject. So please add your thoughts below.