How To Write Blog Articles Faster And Better
Mar 19th, 2010 by Reading and Writing
A lot of people blog for a living these days. A lot of bloggers get into it because they have a website and have found blogging to be a way to get traffic to their website. Others bloggers are writers who make extra income writing blog posts for others. Many bloggers do both.
If you’re writing blog posts for a living, you’re going to have to do a lot of writing to make any money at it. You may find yourself writing up to a hundred articles a week. If you’re stuck for ideas, you’re going to have a hard time making your quotas!
Sometimes, you have to write multiple articles on one subject. This is good in one way, because it cuts down on your research time. If you get an assignment to write about something you don’t know anything about - scrapbooking papers, for example - you will have to spend as much as an hour researching the subject. That’s a lot of wasted time for one article, but not much at all for a series of ten or twenty.
If you’re given a technical assignment and they only want a single article, turn it down if it doesn’t negatively impact your job. If you have to spend three hours reading about the inner mechanism of a digital sport watch and then get paid for only 500 words, your hourly rate won’t amount to much. If all you have to do is write about how good the watch looks, though, that’s easy.
Some writers like to get technical assignments because all those facts give them something to write about. They’re at a loss if they’re given an assignment that tells them to write about the aesthetics of a black helmet versus a white helmet. What’s there to say? Some people like one, some like another. How can you write 500 words about that?
If you’re a technical writer and find writing non-technical articles daunting, try a few. All you have to do is stop thinking technically and let your gut feelings take over. Maybe you think of tough bikers when you think of black helmets. When you think of a white one, you see an image of a girl on a motor scooter riding through the streets of Paris. Write about those feelings. Fashion is about feelings, so your opinion is as good as anybody’s!
Creative writers often get frustrated by technical articles. If that sounds like you, just gather a few pertinent facts and weave them into your article, filling in the blanks with fluff. You’re writing a blog post, not a textbook, after all. All your employer is asking of you is that you write a certain number of informative words. He’s not asking for a Pulitzer Prize, so don’t get carried away. Keep it light and enjoyable and you will find yourself getting much more work done.
