Hey, what's up, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
I got a question about blogging here and it is about how long it takes to write a blog
post.
This question says, “Hey, thanks a lot for your last email.
It feels good that your blogging course just doesn’t finish with the last content section
but that you’re really caring about the effect it has.”
If you want to know what he’s talking about, I answer personally the emails in the blogging
course that I give for free.
Check it out here.
Sign up and you won’t regret it.
“If you take a look at my code project profile you could find articles I produced since the
beginning of the blogging course.
I just counted 6 articles in 6 weeks.
Not bad, is it?”
That’s great.
“Perhaps you can help me with a point where I’m struggling right now, time management.
My last post comes to 1500 words and it took me approximately 8 hours to create.
I already split the topic into 2 posts and cut some points just to get it done by yesterday
but still this post took me 8 hours and that is a lot.
How do you manage to get your content out in a shorter time?
Could you share how long you sit on example 500 words in average?
Once again, thanks for the email and your support.
Best, Konstantin.”
Konstantin I’ll give you the simple answer.
In order for me to write about a 2000-word blog post it takes about an hour and a half
now.
I write really fast.
Consider that I’ve written a 150,000-word book and I was at least—I’m not writing
a lot of blog posts now but at a time I was writing several blog posts a week.
I was writing perhaps 2 to 3000 words a day.
You get good at it and you get used to it.
The more that you do it the faster that it’s going to be.
It also depends on the content.
If you do a lot of technical stuff it’s going to require research and time and it’s
going to take longer to write.
But as you get better at researching and even writing technical content that time will go
down.
So don’t worry so much about how much time it takes.
But one strategy I would just give you is that—well, first let me tell you, it will
go down.
Just keep on going, keep on going and the time will go down.
You will get faster.
Some exercise to get faster is 2 things, one, time box it.
Absolutely just time box it.
Say that I’m going to spend 4 hours on a post max and know how much time you have left
so this way when you’re halfway through it and you’re 3 hours through you know you
need to start going and wrap it up.
The second thing I’ll say is start shipping things before they’re done.
Nothing is ever going to be totally done so be willing to ship it out a little bit less
state of done because sometimes that extra last 10% takes 50 of the time.
That makes sense, right?
So something a blog post might take you 4 hours but 2 hours of it was spent creating
the 80% of it and the last 2 hours was spent creating the last 20%, if you can condense
that time and you’ve got to get used to shipping.
Real quick, I’ll tell you also writers for newspapers they learn this.
If you watch, you’ll see like go to Newsweek or CNN or Fox or whatever and watch the articles
that come out from the same author and you’ll see that they wrote 3 articles a day, some
of them.
Sometimes they write more than that or sites, different blog sites like Gawker and Engadget
and stuff like that.
You’ll see they’re writing all these.
How are they doing it?
Simple.
They have a deadline.
They know that they need to get it done so they do it, they compress the time and they
ship it.
Ship a lot.
If you ship a lot you’re going to get fast.
If you create those constraints you’re going to meet those constraints.
It’ll be amazing.
You’ll see that that will improve over time.
You’ll kind of get good at—there’s sort of this progression of shipping less than
the perfect stuff.
You get good at—I used to—everything I write I ship the first draft.
I don’t even edit.
At first it was producing a crappy result but I got good at doing that and I guarantee
you that a lot of writers who write 3 or 4 articles a day they probably have learned
that same skill.
That’s a little trick.
I think developing that skill is better than being good at creating different revisions
of a thing.
Anyway, I hope that helps you.
If you’re interested in signing up for my free blogging course, do so here.
If you like this video, subscribe.