1 sentence that will help you stick to your blogging schedule

Copywriting

How to write 128,250 words without even noticing

Blogging is hard. Not climbing-Everest hard. But pretty hard.

Writing a new post is a task that too often migrates to the southern territories of your to-do list. Good content takes time and time is a commodity you’re short of. A flurry of tasks lands on your desk each week. Before you know it a month has passed and that blog of yours is looking seriously malnourished.

And those prime chunks of content that fill out other blogs? They look daunting.

Thing is, what with everyone hanging out online these days, blogging is pretty much a necessity. Showing you know your field, appeasing the search ranking gods and building a dialogue with your audience that keeps them coming back. It all requires good content, on the regular.

Transform your blogging habits by committing to a process

To achieve anything meaningful, writer and entrepreneur James Clear1 advocates forgetting about your goals and focusing on your processes. Generating a tonne of great content for your blog is a goal. A goal that’s so big and scary that it stifles your productivity.

Forget about it.

Instead, commit to a process. Set yourself up to write a new blog post every Wednesday afternoon. Or whenever. The point here is commitment. Stick to your process and the results will quickly stack up. Fixating on creating a blog jam-packed with great content? Scary. Focusing on publishing 400-words every Wednesday afternoon? Easy.

Houses are built one brick at a time.

How to write 128,250 words without even noticing

One of my longest-standing jobs as a writer is a music column for a regional newspaper. I submit 450-words a week, in time for the print deadline. Since I started back in 2009, the poor editors have received 285 editions of my witterings. That’s a rough total of 128,250 words - enough for two meaty novels (or 1.25 Hobbits, for any J. R. R. Tolkien fans).

Now, if back in 2009 my editor had said to me that my task was to write two novels about the North Devon music scene, I likely would have responded by spiralling into a full blown panic attack - even with a five-year deadline. But by committing to the process of submitting 450-words, week after week, that word count has stacked up without me even noticing.

If I can do it, you can. You just need to find a way to engineer a little pressure into your process.

1 sentence that will help you stick to your blogging schedule

New post every Wednesday.

Okay, it doesn’t have to be every Wednesday. But you get the idea. Stick this sentence at the top of your blog, right where everyone can see it. Have it tattooed on your hand and set it on repeat in your calendar. Email your colleagues and subscribers to explain the deal.

These guys get it.

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Making a visible, public promise like this is a surprisingly powerful way to coerce your writing muscles into flexing on demand. And if you give that a go and you’re still too busy? Don’t let your blog perish when our copywriters can keep it happily nourished. Say the word.

Footnotes

There’s a great blog post from James Clear on goals versus processes here.

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Jamie Harper

Copywriter,
London Design Works.

Communication pervert with BA (Hons) in English Language Studies and 1.25 million words in the portfolio. Spend days duking it out with synonyms, sometimes for global brands. Spend downtime wondering what kind of hands the person who invented shrink wrap has.