How I Write 9 Blog Posts a Week
Find a recipe and stick with it.
Since I started writing over a year ago, I average eight to ten blog posts per week.
I publish on Medium at least five times per week and to two other blogs.
You can, too, if that is your goal.
The more you write, the more prolific you become.
Writing is a part of nearly every profession. If you email, you’re a writer. Write pithy tweets? Writer. Write thoughtful captions to your Instagram posts? Writer.
Professional writers — those who make money from their work — know how to turn out content at a prolific rate. Their words make them money, so producing quality work earns.
Pro tip: Writing is a muscle or skill. The more you work your writing muscle or improve your writing skill, the less taxing it is to produce a lot of words per day.
A year ago, it was much harder and more of a struggle for me to write just one blog post per day, in every aspect. More mental bandwidth was needed for all the steps: coming up with the idea, researching, sitting in the chair, bounding out words, finding an image that rocks, ignoring my phone, editing. All of it was more draining.
After a year of practice, it’s miles easier.
Here is my strategy for writing enough words to turn into a blog post a day or more
Choose a topic or topics
Most writers write from experience, are interested in a topic or a combination of both.
Have something to say. You have opinions, use them in your writing. Everyone has something to say. We are all here to find our purpose; everyone is born with the desire to do something beyond themselves.
What do you want to say to your readers, what message do you want to impart? Do you want to serve your readers by teaching them something new that you have learned or learn something new and share your experience with them in real-time?
Figure out what your particular topic is.
I went through a terrible divorce and long-term marriage. The experience gave me much to write about relationships, love, and trust. Those are the topics I feel comfortable writing.
First Step
Write a list of the topics where you feel you have something to share and say.
Here are some of mine:
- Relationships
- Life Lessons
- Divorce
- Writing
- Productivity
- Entrepreneurship
- Blogging
- Money
- Financial Freedom
- Love
- Politics
- Social Media
We all have things we are good at, have an education in, have a ton of experience with, or want to learn. What are yours?
If you are stuck, ask yourself these questions.
- When I go out with a friend, what do I like to talk about?
- When I look up things to read on the internet, what are those topics?
- What podcasts interest me most?
- What have I had schooling/training in?
- When I’m scrolling Facebook, what topics make me stop and read?
- What advice do I typically give to friends and loved ones?
We all have different interests and talents, write yours. When you have a strong opinion about something, share it. The confidence in your beliefs will jump off the page and resonate with your reader, even if it is negatively and your reader strongly disagrees, well, they are still reading your writing, and maybe they will leave a thoughtful comment and share their point of view and give you another angle from which to write your next article.
Treat writing like a job
I write when I don’t feel like it. I don’t want to write ninety percent of the time.
However, after about 20 minutes, I want to keep writing one hundred percent of the time.
When in the zone, and on a roll with a thought, I don’t let anyone interrupt my writing; the doorbell, phone, partner, child. I have to write! It is in my blood. It calms me down, organizes my thoughts, and makes me feel whole. One hundred percent of the time, I feel satisfied after writing. I’m never satisfied with what I wrote, I usually think it’s crap, but I satisfied that I wrote.
Write on the days you don’t want to.
If you only write on the days you want to, you will write a few times a month at that, and most likely your writing will read like a journal entry because you haven’t flexed your writing muscle in a while.
It’s similar to drinking a green smoothie.
It would be much easier grabbing the cranberry-ginger scone sitting behind glass at my local espresso bar than to cut up a bunch of veggies and blend it into a smoothie.
But after I make an effort and drink said smoothie, I feel great. I have more energy. I gave my body much-needed vitamins, and the energy it gives allows me to write longer. After I make it, I realize it took much less effort than originally thought, maybe five minutes.
Prolific Writer’s Smoothie:
- A handful of greens kale or arugula
- A handful of spinach
- ½ flat-leaf parsley
- One celery stalk
- Half a cucumber
- An inch of ginger
- One peeled lemon
- One small apple
- A pinch or more (your preference) cayenne
- 2 cups of filtered water
Blend and drink.
Write from a different blogging personality type
For most writing online, you can write from any perspective you want, or as any type of writer, especially on Medium.
There are all types of writers and writing on Medium.
You can write from any personality you want, which keeps writing challenging and staves off boredom. You will get bored. But how badly do you want to change your life?
Whenever I’m bored with writing, I try to write something funny and satirical or a poem, both, not my forte.
Authos Jeff Goins writes there are five blogging types; The Journalist, The Prophet, The Artist, The Professor, and The Star. Each writes using a different strategy.
Pick one or use all five.
You can be any kind of writer you want.
Choose a role you are most comfortable with, which you will find allows you to express yourself in your most authentic voice.
I do a bit of all five.
Research is fun for me, I have strong opinions, and I love helping people find ways to live their best life and write better. I love writing about writing. I’ve taken writing classes, and I feel it’s in my comfort zone. When I want to get out of my comfort zone, I write a poem or satire. Rarely do I share the latter, though.
Since I could write, my goal was, and still is, to find out what my best self and life look like and to manifest my vision. I love sharing my life experiences while distilling what that looks like for me. I want to help people by sharing my journey, not just my successes but also my failures. When we fail, we learn the most.
Readers love reading about failures and seeing you transcend them. We are all human, we all fail, and we all love to triumph. Write about your shortcomings and tribulations.
What I initially thought was a failure turned out to be my biggest triumph and lead me to my greatest happiness. I wrote about it here.
Sit down and pour it onto the page, but don’t edit
When you sit down to write, practice what a teacher in a writing class I took calls jam-session writing. Jam-session writing is writing for a few hours with no distractions and no editing allowed.
Just write, distraction-free. Turn off everything, all notifications, or put your phone in the other room.
When you turn off your self-editor, you get more words onto the page that you will later edit and chisel down to something meaningful. The more words you get down, the more you have to sculpt and shape.
Make it bleed
Can you imagine if Michelangelo just grabbed a slab of marble and called in David?
If he did, we wouldn’t know his name now.
No, he carved the marble into a masterpiece.
Do this with your jam-session writing, get rid of the extra, anything that doesn’t add to your story.
Editing is a game of subtraction, finding, and keeping the right details to serve the story and deleting the rest.
Many details will end up on the cutting room floor because they don’t add urgency or beauty to the overall writing, sometimes even a sentence or a paragraph we love.
Be ruthless.
Editing is rewriting; it’s making changes in structure and entire sentences or moving them around in the article to make it as clear and concise for your audience as you can.
Nearly every time a piece I write is rejected from a publication, it needed a few more edits. And I’m glad it wasn’t published. Because it wasn’t good.
Walk away from your writing and come back with fresh eyes; it will be more obvious what needs to be deleted, rearranged, or worked on for clarity.
Everyone develops their own creative process over time
Here is my process:
- I have to write in the AM — as close to waking as possible. These are my power hours, when I have the most to give to writing.
- Too much caffeine makes me tired, try green tea.
- I turn off all notifications on the platform I’m using to write my jam-session writing. Including text messages, email and social media notifications.
- I take a break at noon.
- Edit later, much later. The following day is best. Try not to edit the same day.
- Fasting gives me more energy to write. I fast from 7:00 pm to 10:00 am.
- I get up from my chair and stretch once every hour to keep going.
- I look away from my screen every 20 minutes to give my eyes a break.
If you want to be a prolific writer, you have to make it a habit, and not let anyone or anything interfere with your writing time.
Successful writers have a routine, and they don’t allow others to interfere with it.
If you want to earn an income from your work, make writing your life, take it seriously, and soon you will be writing eight blog posts, or more a week once you develop your writing muscle and your recipe for increased output.
Take as much as you want from my recipe.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
