5 tips for faster WordPress blog posts
Writing blog posts is important for your WordPress and practically for any website. No matter if you’re simply a blogger, a business owner or any other type of content creator that relies on articles, writing good and quickly is always good.
Today, I want to discuss a few tips that helped me improve my efficiency as a blog writer. Though they’re simple, they’re very valuable for anyone that wants to improve their writing skills.
Decide on the topic first
No matter your niche – you have to think of a topic for your post first. It doesn’t have to be something major, especially if you don’t have that much time to craft your first draft.
What if I’m stuck without any topic ideas?
Been there, done that.
A very useful technique (at least for me) to get out of that funk, is to take a sheet of paper and writing any topics that come to find while having a general idea in my head.
Let’s say my topic is – healthy diets.
Take the keyword and play around with it. Just of the top of my head I can think of:
- Benefits of healthy diets
- Benefits of gluten-free diets
- Benefits of including more vegetables for healthy diets, etc.
Questions, lists of tips or solutions can also be a great source for topics as well as content:
- 5 tips for making your diet more healthy
- Can a healthy diet help improve your immune system long term? And so on.
Of course this is just me thinking on the spot. You’ll probably generate 50 topics or more on your paper. Don’t think much about the ridiculousness of them, you’ll sort out the ones you like later on.
Topic generation is the first step you need to master in order to write more efficiently.
Plan it out
After you get your topic, the next thing you want to do is to set an outline for your content. Think of the things you want to cover and your readers might find useful.
If it’s a short post, don’t get too focused on the tiny details and just write a general idea of something. And outline will not only guide you as your write your post, but will help your readers to follow later on, as they will, most likely, become headlines that separate the text.
Let’s get back to the same example.
‘Say I decided on the topic of how to improve your everyday diet.
My outline would be something like this:
- How to make a diet plan for yourself
- Must include products to include into your daily ration
- Products to cut from your everyday diet
- Healthy habits for a more effective healthy diet
And so on.
If your topic is more general, you’ll probably end up with 2-3 things you want to talk about, going more in-depth will of course mean a bigger plan.
This is just the way I do things, and you’re free to use a strategy for your planning to be the most effective. I just like to get a general thought, and make a more specific on paper in the process.
Set a timer
Another thing which I think increases efficiency for me is a timer. Working under some level of stress is usually more helpful than just sitting around a task forever.
Same thing with writing.
If you want to improve on your fast writing you have to limit yourself to the amount you spend on a single post.
When I first started writing blog posts for business, I used to heavily overthink everything and spending most of the time just thinking about what and how to write instead of just writing.
Sometimes a single blog post would take 1-2 hours a day to compose. This trick helped me to narrow down my time to about 20-30 minutes for a short, 300-400 word post, basically, in any niche.
Set a goal for the time your aiming for, and as you practice, shorten the spans periodically.
Write. Stop when out of time.
Continuing on the same note, now is the time to write.
Just write.
Don’t get distracted by your surroundings and just focus on this one task at hand of composing your blog post and getting your idea across for the readers.
As soon as you see the timer stopping – stop writing.
Track your progress every day and I can guarantee you’ll see progress. This will not only help you train yourself to be more efficient at getting articles out, but also train the mindset to have for when writing an article.
The more you’ll get the hang of it, the easier it’ll get. That’s what I think at least.
Don’t get frustrated and practice
It’s normal to struggle staying on time at the start. It even might get completely frustrating if you feel you don’t put out the amount of content in a period that you would like to.
Trust me, it gets better.
As cliche as it sounds, practice does make perfect. Dedicate some time from your day to writing. It shouldn’t be a chore even if you’re writing on work related topics. That stuff can become fun too, as long as you find an interesting angle for it.
And if it becomes interesting for you personally? Well, your texts will be much more appealing to readers as well.
I feel like whenever I become more involved, want to do research and learn something, I end up being more motivated to write and write good.
If you’re forcing it, just don’t write that day at all and focus on some other stuff. Your audience will certainly see through a bad text.
All in all
In this article I want to share my few thoughts on how you can become a better and faster writer. Composing blog posts shouldn’t be a pain in the bottom for anyone, even if its part of your everyday work.
Hope these help you out!
