This is a guest post by Michael Scottsdale. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.
If you’re planning a career in blog and article writing, learning to write content quickly helps you take in more assignments while giving yourself more time to spend for friends and family. The main problem with being a writer is that I found myself spending more time writing and less time for anything else. For those planning to take up writing as a full time profession or having difficulties balancing their writing profession with their personal lives, here are a few tips to help us become more efficient.
Keep a list of ideas
One of the first things that I noticed was that a great deal of the time I spent in front of my laptop was trying to come up with ideas for my blog. I found that having a pen and paper beside me all the time was a convenient way of writing these ideas down. Mental notes are discouraged as these ideas disappear as soon as easily as we come up with them.
Stay Focused
A simple sentence or phrase is all it takes to have a good idea or topic. Stay within the boundaries of your topic. Creativity will always be a must have for any writer but this could be distracting especially when your ideas are flying off the topic. If you’re trying to tell something, tell it at the first paragraph, the body and reinforce it at the last paragraph. Try to master this technique and you’ll be on your way to reaching that 30 minute blog. It helps you eliminate 60 percent of the writing workload.
Bullets
Bullets are an easy way of creating a basic outline for your article. These may represent points for starting out a new paragraph. You can then build on these to create content. It also helps you give a brief overview of the finished article and provides a solid anchor for building content.
Write before editing
Try to get the word count up as much as possible in as little time as possible. Checking your grammar and spelling could be done after accomplishing the article. Get those ideas down into writing before they escape your mind. Editing on the go could cost you some precious minutes and destroys the writing flow. It’s definitely easier to proof edit your writing than spend minutes coming up with content.
Short, Simple, Informative
Keep your blogs short and simple. Good blog posts are ideally around 300 to 500 words long. This is long enough for search engines to pick up while short enough to capture your reader’s attention. Longer content could be broken down into two articles which could be posted the following day. This makes you more efficient and gives you a much needed breather.
Use Photos and Images
Images help reinforce the content while providing some much needed color and life into your blogs. This is also an excellent way of “filling” in those spaces. Placing a photo or two stretches out your blog making it appear longer than it seems. Photos and images also have a story of their own and could increase the overall content of your blog.
Michael Scottsdale is a professional writer and currently works as a consultant for online businesses. When he’s not writing for Intermedia’s Hosted Exchange, he could be found blogging about simple tips on how people could take advantage of the internet’s numerous business opportunities.
