How to Produce Consistently High-Quality Content

By using different skill sets for each phase of the writing process.

Whether you are publishing to your own blog, using a community blogging platform or another medium on which you need to produce valuable content on a regular basis, sometimes, you hit a wall.

It’s not easy to write consistently high-quality, interesting and valuable pieces day in and day out. It’s not easy to come up with topics or to deliver what your audience expects from you — and most importantly deliver what you expect from yourself.

Blogging and content creation sound easier than it is — after all, you just write about whatever you want and then your readers read you, right? Wrong. It’s a lot of hard work and you need every bit of help you can get.

In order to keep up with a certain publishing consistency — be it daily or several times a week — you need to treat your writing as a job. And transforming your hobby or vocation into a job doesn’t always feel like the right thing to do.

You need to work hard to keep the joy factor and at the same time become productive enough to create quality content that keeps you interested in what you do.

I realised that whenever I’ve been stuck with writing in the past, it was usually because I wanted to achieve too many things at once.

See, writing can be divided into separate phases — and each phase is very different from the others.

It starts with ideation — when you come up with tons of ideas that you will be able to choose from. Then comes the phase of outlining or drafting — depending on your writing style you either do this or you don’t. Then comes the actual writing part when you type and type. And then comes the part where you edit — structurally, grammatically and stylistically.

The truth is that each phase requires a slightly different mindset, therefore wanting to do them all at once or in one go can actually negatively influence the output.

Ideation

Ideation is the most creative step in the process — when you’re thinking about what to actually write. You need to use abstractions, you need to go a little crazy, you don’t need to stick to reality — after all, these are just first ideas.

The point of coming up with lots of ideas is to get your creative juices flowing and to get you into the right state of mind.

Ideation is the phase when quantity matters more than quality. You need to come up with as many things as you possibly can — you need to think of it as a funnel. You need a lot of fluff to load into the top of the funnel to get something valuable coming out at the bottom.

There are quite a few techniques that you can use to come up with ideas.

• 10-idea-a-day: Initially I saw this from Ayodeji Awosika. He comes up with ten article titles each day and starts working on one or two. It is as simple as it sounds, just don’t stop the process even if you think you found the best one. Do yourself a favour and go through with it. Collect a list of titles and you might find you have enough to work from for weeks or months.
• Forced connection, random words: This can be very useful if you are usually writing about the same topic. Go online and look for a random word generator (or open a book and point at a word) and use the random word to link it to your usual topic. For example: if you write about feminism and you get the random word “eraser”, try to come up with titles combining the two words or the concept coming with it. It could be like: “Does feminism really erase men’s rights?” or “Erasing feminism from our vocabulary can help the cause”.
• Forced connection, known-unknown: They say you need to write about what you know. And others say that there is no growth in always writing about only what you know. Combine the two. Add new topics to your writing by venturing into areas that you haven’t touched before. Say you write about writing mostly. Add popular topics to it, such as tech, AI, marketing, sexuality, finance, environment, equality etc. to your usual topic and come up with ideas how to write about your known area with injecting something unknown to it.

Drafts and Outlines

While ideation requires free-thinking and crazy creativity with no limits, you need some discipline to outline your piece or to come up with a draft. Maybe you are not the type of writer who does outlines, but every now and then you might need them. And when you do, this is where you need to focus.

I usually write without outlining and I allow myself to ramble in my drafts — knowing that I will edit them anyway.

This is the part where you can throw in your ideas and you can define what your point will be, what you really want to say. You also need a couple of supporting arguments.

I like to leave a lot of freedom for myself with my outlines because sometimes my writing takes a completely different direction.

Writing

This is the point when you need a very different mindset from both ideation and outlining. This requires a disciplined kind of creativity — with some leeway to ramble and come up with new ideas — but still keeping yourself to the topic.

The best way is if you already know what you want to write about and you have the outline in your head, so you can follow it without having to check it all the time. This is when you just get everything out on the screen — you think creatively, and you enter a flow state.

In a flow state, writing can get really easy-going and it feels great, it is fun and enjoyable. If I disrupt it with looking up the appropriate quotes or trying to find the right reference for the source I am quoting, or if I start to edit my mistakes, I can snap out of my flow state.

It’s not only going to impact the final output, but it makes the process slower and clumsier. On top of that, you can be losing the momentum and get frustrated for not advancing quick enough.

Here’s what not to do when you are writing:

• Don’t look up synonyms.
• Don’t edit your grammar (the best is to switch off the spellcheck or write on a surface where there is none so that the alerts don’t throw you off).
• Don’t format your paragraphs at all.
• Don’t think about the best headline.
• Don’t look for the best image.

Anything that breaks your writing flow will slow you down and snap you out of your most productive state. Get used to just writing and do every other thing as a separate phase.

Editing

Editing requires a more analytical and critical mindset than any other step in this list. This is when you check if your writing has value; if it has a point. It’s where you check structure and style; where you correct grammar, look up synonyms or look up the exact quotes to support your point.

Editing needs a very different mindset and skillset.

If you edit on the go you lose more than you gain — and you don’t get to the finished product quicker, it just feels like it.

Summary

My biggest writing fault used to be that I wanted to do everything at once. I came up with an idea, I started to write it and I edited it on the go — only to realise that I had an even better idea and I should just do some research for it. I was losing precious time and it made me frustrated. Not to mention that I didn’t even accomplish as much as I could have.

Ideally, the ideation-drafting/writing/editing for the same piece should be done on a different day. At least, this is what I’ve found to enable me to work the most efficiently.

Obviously, it can be done on the same day as well, if you leave enough time for your brain to get into the right mindset, to work its most effective magic. Leaving even a couple of hours for yourself and working on something else can bring better results too.

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