Last friday a client called me up and asked for a quick blog post. She wanted to cover an event that was coming up that weekend and asked me if it was possible to write it in the following 24 hours. Was it possible to write something that fast?
For me, the answer was yes.
I write very quickly (enough so that my friends frequently drill me on my typing speed), but I’ve been doing it for seven years. What if you’re a busy entrepreneur who last composed something in college or high school and intentionally avoids email?
How long can you realistically expect to spend writing a blog post and is it worth the investment?
The Truth About Blog Post Writing
On average, it can take between 15 minutes and an hour to write one blog post. If you write 300 words on an upcoming event, it shouldn’t take long at all. If you are writing a 1,000 word post about a new technology in your industry, expect it to take much longer.
That can be daunting to a business owner who has so much else to focus on. And then you have to write another one next week? And every week after that?
It’s overwhelming.
So to cut down on that time, get more out of your posts and actually have fun, here are a few tips every business owner can use to write more with the time they have.
- Respond to Other Posts – If you’re blogging, you should also be reading other blogs. Save them when you do using Feedly or another tool like it. Then go back and respond to those posts in your own. It’s a lot easier to comment on something that write something new from scratch.
- Use Video Responses – Video is a powerful tool and for some business owners, a lot easier. Flip on your webcam, talk for 5 minutes on a topic important to your industry and upload it to YouTube, then post it on your blog.
- Set Aside 10 Minutes a Day – Instead of spending an hour or two once a week blogging, try to spread it out in 10-15 minute chunks every day. Write every day for a short period of time before you start in the morning and it will feel much more manageable.
- Dictate Your Posts – Use the Dictate feature on a Mac or get software like Dragon for Windows and dictate your posts directly. It’s about three times faster than typing and while you’ll almost always need to edit it, you can cut down on composition time by a lot.
Every one of these will help you speed up the rate at which you write blog posts, but more importantly, not feel overwhelmed by the process.
Sure, you can hire a company like Great Leap to do it for you (we’re awesome at it), but if that’s not in the budget or if you want to maintain control over your company’s voice, you need a way to get it done on time, every time.
Create a habit out of it and use the shortcuts above to do that and more week to week.
