A client called me on a Friday afternoon and asked if I could write a blog post by the end of the day. She wanted to cover an event happening that weekend — not a long piece, just something to get it out there and indexed before the event took place.
For me, that was doable. I write quickly, I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I knew the client’s industry well enough that I didn’t need to do a lot of background research before I started. The post was done before dinner.
But that situation gets me thinking about how wildly different the answer to this question is depending on who’s asking it.
The Honest Answer
For a professional content writer working in a field they know, a solid 600 to 800-word blog post takes somewhere between 45 minutes and two hours. That includes the time to think through the angle, write a draft, and do a quick editing pass. A shorter post on a familiar topic can go faster. A long, research-heavy piece on a technical subject can take four hours or more.
For a business owner who doesn’t write regularly, doesn’t love writing, and hasn’t sat down to compose anything longer than an email in years — the same post might take three to five hours. Not because they’re slow, but because the process of deciding what to say, organizing it, getting past the blank page, and producing something they’re comfortable publishing takes significantly more effort when it isn’t a practiced skill.
That’s the reality most business owners are dealing with, and it’s worth being honest about rather than pretending a blog post is something you can knock out in twenty minutes on a Tuesday morning.
What Eats the Time
People tend to assume the writing itself is the slow part. In my experience, it usually isn’t. The writing goes relatively quickly once you know what you’re going to say. The time gets consumed in other places.
Topic selection and angle take longer than expected. Deciding not just what to write about but what specific angle to take — what the post is actually arguing, explaining, or addressing — is where a lot of people get stuck before they’ve typed a single word. A blog post without a clear angle becomes a rambling collection of vague observations that takes forever to write and produces something nobody wants to read.
Research adds up fast, particularly for technical topics or industries where accuracy matters. A home services company writing about roofing materials, a therapy practice writing about a specific clinical concept, a legal firm writing about a regulatory issue — all of these require reading before writing, and that reading time is invisible to most people when they estimate how long a post will take.
The editing pass is the other underestimated step. First drafts are almost never ready to publish. Something always reads awkwardly, runs too long, or needs a transition that isn’t there. A realistic editing pass adds another 20 to 40 percent to the time a first draft took.
Add all of that up and the estimate for a business owner writing their own blog content starts looking like a significant weekly commitment — which is exactly why so many business owners start a blog with good intentions and abandon it within a few months.
Strategies That Help
The time problem is real, but it’s manageable with the right approach. After years of writing for clients across a wide range of industries, a few things consistently make the process faster and less painful for people who aren’t professional writers.
The most useful strategies include:
- Write a Rough Outline First — Even three to five bullet points before you start writing dramatically reduces the time spent staring at a blank page. An outline gives the draft somewhere to go and prevents the kind of mid-post confusion that makes people stop, start over, and lose an hour. I almost always outline before I write, even for short posts.
- Respond to Something Rather Than Starting from Scratch — One of the easiest ways to generate a post is to respond to a question a client or customer asked you recently, push back on a common misconception in your industry, or weigh in on something you read or heard. Starting from a reaction is almost always faster than starting from nothing.
- Write in Short Sessions Rather Than Long Blocks — Most people try to set aside one large block of time to write a blog post and find the block either gets cancelled or they burn out halfway through. Writing in 15 to 20-minute sessions across a few days is often faster and produces better results. I do this myself on longer or more complex posts.
- Use Voice-to-Text for a First Draft — Dictating a rough draft is significantly faster than typing one for most people, and the conversational quality of spoken language often produces more readable first drafts than laboriously constructed sentences do. Tools like the built-in dictation features on most devices or dedicated software like Dragon work well for this. The draft almost always needs cleanup, but it gets something on the page quickly.
- Keep a Running Topic List — The time spent deciding what to write about is time that can be eliminated almost entirely by maintaining a list of potential topics as they occur to you. A note on your phone, a document on your desktop, anything — the goal is to never sit down to write without already knowing what the post is going to be about.
These aren’t shortcuts that sacrifice quality. They’re systems that remove the friction that makes the process feel harder than it needs to be.
When It Makes More Sense to Outsource
There’s a point where the math on writing your own blog content stops making sense. If your time is worth a meaningful amount per hour, and a blog post takes you three to four hours to produce, and you’re producing one or more per week — the cost of doing it yourself is often higher than what it would cost to have it done professionally, particularly when you factor in the quality difference that comes from a dedicated content writer versus a business owner writing in their spare time.
Great Leap Studios handles blog posts and broader content marketing for businesses across a wide range of industries. The work is written in the client’s voice, optimized for search, and produced on a consistent schedule that doesn’t compete with everything else on your plate.
That said, some business owners want to write their own content — for voice consistency, for the connection it creates with their audience, or simply because they enjoy it. If that’s you, the strategies above will help. If the time cost has become a problem or the blog has gone quiet because writing keeps getting pushed down the priority list, that’s a conversation worth having.
Call (347) 460-5492 or reach out through the contact page to discuss what a content writing arrangement might look like for your business.
