How To Write a Blog Post In Four Hours
Who already knows how to write a blog post in four hours? Share your tips below, please. For many bloggers, however, the idea of how to write a blog post in four hours can seem daunting. I promise you it’s not!
Blogs are much like online magazines, except, you are the publisher of the magazine. You, the blogger.
As Chloe DiVita, our COE (Chief of Everything), mentioned in her opening remarks at this year’s social media conference, in today’s world of online publishing, each of us is our own publisher, editor, photographer, and marketer, among other things. The publisher part of who we are sometimes trips people up.
How many times have you thought to yourself, “Do I write a blog post today? I wrote one yesterday. Is it necessary to post daily? Will I lose traffic if I don’t post today?”
Those are familiar questions. And, lest you think you are alone, we all question the timing of our content at one time or another. Wondering about how to post or when to post, as well as what to post, is a common issue with all bloggers, no matter what level we are at in our journey to success.
My goal today is to help you learn how to write a blog post in four hours. It’s not that hard, I promise!
Here’s are four easy ways to make that happen.
Create an editorial calendar.
You’ve been advised to do this before. Don’t act so surprised. I was one of the first bloggers, over 12 years ago, to suggest an editorial calendar for blog posting. In that concept, you will create your topics based on your blog focus. Write headline news on Monday, for instance. Write an original post –your thoughts on a topic you mentioned Monday, perhaps–on Wednesday. And, share relevant social content from friends and colleagues on Friday.
Once you create the calendar of information, you’re set to go on any particular day.
Become more aware of ‘breaking news’ items in media.
Put aside the “social” part of media and look for more relevant articles, studies, or content that fits your blog topic. A recent article that impressed me was about horses. While many of us stick with small animals on our blogs, we’re discovering a good number of large animal bloggers at BlogPaws. This is an article one might expect to see on a horse blog, perhaps Susan Friedland Smith’s blog Saddle Seeks Horse, a proud winner of this year’s Nose to Nose Award for Best Other Blog. I do caution you to remember to vet your sources. This one comes from a dedicated horse magazine and is written by a veterinarian, so it’s trustworthy.
Create a file folder on your system to store a solid group of images available for use in a pinch.
Having images available at the snap of your fingers, saves a lot of time. Images are critical to sharing of online content, and having images that speak to the reader as much as your words speak to her is one way to build traffic over time. There are a number of great free resources for images, but trying to wade through them when you’re working on your four-hour post can waste a lot of time. Better to build your own “stock photo” file with 20 or more generic but relevant images to use.
Create your CTAs.
CTA stands for Call To Action. Each post should have a closing call to action. What do you want the reader to do next? It’s easy to create these in niche blogging. At BlogPaws, we want people to join the Social Learning Community, sign up for our newsletter, or register for our conference. We have other CTAs throughout the year, but those are our primary calls and closing out a post with one of them becomes easy, since we know what they are and can determine which one fits our post, well ahead of time.
Each of these bullet points is a time saver, if you use it routinely. Let it become automatic.
By having an editorial calendar, by being aware of news media outlets that write about your kind of content, by having a variety of images ready to go, and by knowing what CTA you’ll use in your post, you can easily create a fabulous, outstanding post in four hours or less. If you think four hours is too short, learn to type faster. No kidding.
I’d love to hear from you on how you manage to keep your blog updated. Can you create prime content in four hours or less?
Want more advice and training like this, only in more detail? Register for the 2017 Conference – before Early Bird ends!
Yvonne DiVita is a Co-Founder of BlogPaws. She is dedicated to storytelling and the human-animal bond. When not working on BlogPaws, she writes at Scratchings and Sniffings and The Lipsticking Society. You may contact her at Yvonne@blogpaws.com.
Images: Fotokostic /Shutterstock.com and Semmick Photo / Shutterstock.com
