We are in the era of the internet. To write an article for your blog or website, you must satisfy two sets of eyes. One is the human readers. And two are the search engines.
To cater for our fellow human beings, their reading preferences are sophisticated. Nick Brian who is a Medium contributor, said the HIT approach should work. HIT stands for Help, Inspire and Teach. So, the approach should be about helping, inspiring or teaching others. It’s okay too if your approach uses a combination of those. Let’s look at the context. Readers usually prefer to read something authentic, something original and not copy-pasted content. The story must also be easy to understand, well-structured flow, crisp, detailed and honest.
Now let’s talk about capturing the attention of search engines, especially Google. Why Google? Simply because it controls more than 90 per cent of the searches globally, according to Statista. First, here’s a small fact. The average length of Google’s first-page content is roughly 1,447 words, according to Backlinko research. From the reader’s point of view, it’s approximately seven to eight minutes of reading. To keep their attention steady, the tone of the article itself must be interesting. Keep the tone casual complemented by words that address the first party such as you, your, I and me do help.
Why blog?
Writing a blog is important. It is a strategy for us to optimise our searchability online. This marketing strategy is called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. You see, there are two sides to SEO. One is the on-page SEO. The other one is off-page SEO.
Taking care of the on-page SEO is easy. All we have to do is to take care of our website, making sure that the speed is fast, clean and easy to navigate, and the website is updated regularly through articles or blog writing. To work on the off-page SEO is on the other hand, slightly tricky. Off-page is where you enjoy backlinks or references that come back to your website, from other people’s websites or social media channels. To nail the off-page SEO, you need to make your content as quality as possible and then convince other people to have it published on their websites. Both on-page and off-page SEO requires blog writing. And that makes it extremely important.
My own writing speed
FYI, I don’t write at a very high pace if the strategy is to produce a high-quality article. To do this, I must say that my speed is moderate — two reasons why. First, I need to be careful. I’m prone to making silly mistakes. And second, there is tremendous distraction surrounding me.
Usually, I can produce three 2,000-word high-quality articles in one week. It means one nicely-done article every two days. This is my personal way to keep my article’s quality intact. If needed, I can always write one article per day. To do this, I need to find a feel-good place and a good coffee to accompany me while on it. The usual suspect would be a cafe near the beach somewhere. I can seat there for hours and complete a draft. The next day, I can complete the whole article easily and cross-check the grammar and spelling right after that. Done.
For me, it’s pretty tough to write good stuff at home or in the office. Both places are having too much of distractions. They are just unbearable.
Here’s how I do it
To write a good quality article fast, there is a way. Have a look at this strategy I’m using. If I can do it within 2 days tops, you will definitely nail this better than I. FYI, the same strategy here is being utilised by many bloggers out there.
First, I will look for the right topics. There are only a few places I will look for them. It’s either Google Search, Flipboard, Medium, Twitter or LinkedIn. Usually, this will take me less than an hour or so to find one good trending topic for me to write about.
Once I managed to find one topic, I will do another search to find similar ones. Then I decided on one topic that I want to write about. Once the topic is decided, I then Google it again. Based on the keyword search here, I will know a list of already highly-ranked topics that are similar to the one I’m going to write. It also means that the topic that I decided on earlier is not going to rank well in the shortest period of time. After I go through those topics suggested by Google, I will simply pick the one that’s closest to mine as far as the context is concerned, which I will tweak a little so that the topic is well-matched with the insights that I’m going to write.
After the topic for the article is identified, I will start doing some research. While on it, I will write down in Google Docs all the pointers randomly. Besides research, my own past experience and observations are taken into account as well. I will continue expanding the pointers until I feel the details are crisped enough. Most of the time, my pointers will come out to be in a range of two to three pages. It’s pretty long. In my case, usually, to complete this process, I will take up to four or sometimes five hours to conclude the entire list. If I experience writer’s block that day, this alone could take me two days. That’s bad. At this stage, the first draft will probably give me a range of 1,000 to 1,200 words already.
Once this part is done, the rest will be a breather. I will start organising them according to three main structures; the introduction, the body and the conclusion. All the points here will be moved to their own respective categories. Some will go up, some will come down and the rest will stay in between. After the structure and the flow is good to go, I will re-visit the pointers in each category so that they are well-balanced, fueled with enough substance that I want the readers to see and some moral of the stories for them to bring home. Should there be a gap in each of the structures, I will start to patch them with more points that suit the part.
When this is done, I will then start to construct a draft. The activities are simple. I need to go line-by-line to draft a full sentence for each point. After that, I will begin to connect all the pointers and come up with proper sentences in full to bridge between one paragraph and another. I need to be really good at this, otherwise, the entire story might not be having a smooth flow. All in all, it will take easily half-day. Then, I will see that my first draft is done. It is very much a raw one but it is done. When I reach at this point, I know that the number of words could be in the range of 1,600 to 1,800 words already.
Here, I do myself a favour. Take a short break, switch off my Macbook and enjoy my coffee and the surrounding a little. Usually, I would take 2 hours to breathe.
With a fresh mind, I’m ready to clean up the draft further and un-raw it. I will switch on my Macbook back and take a look at the entire story flow and structure deeply. At the same time, I start to refine some of the words by replacing them with a better set of words, changing certain sentences with better ones, changing their places, and adding up some strategic words to make each paragraph fuller and the entire article better and revisit the entire story again to ensure everything is pleasant, simple and easy to understand. At this point, my second draft version is completed. Another 2 to 3 hours will be gone.
If I can still go on, I will continue with the final process but usually, I would stop here and spend the rest of my day doing something else. I just couldn’t stretch myself further. I would rather rest and come back to conclude this article the next day.
Now, the final process. It is pretty much a proofreading day and this is where I need Grammarly badly. I’m not an English native so there’re going to be tons of grammar and spelling mistakes I overlooked. This is the very day when I will find some significant mistakes made and rectify them big time. Being human, mistakes are part of my nature. Grammarly, at least makes me spot them clearly and assists me in correcting those errors immediately.
Besides satisfying the readers’ needs, I need to satisfy the search engines’ requirements too. And at this stage too, I will double-check the title again, find the right sentences for the description of the title, have a set of sub-headings with proper heading size, insert some strategic backlinks within certain words or sentences, and cross-check for plagiarism too should there be any. Here, the total number of words shall be in the range of 2,000 to 2,200 words.
The entire gig will end within half-day, sometimes I continue to process them for another few more hours just to make sure all is good to go. By this time, everything is completed and ready to be published. I hardly publish the article on Day 2. I will wait for the next day and click the publish button in the morning. The promotion will commence once the article is already uploaded to the website. It will be shared on the official page of the website and have the URL ready to be shared with my own personal social media community members too.
Things we need to be careful of
To me, clarity is crucial. I prefer to use simple words to explain my point. If my point is too complicated, I will make it simple. There’s no other way than this. Else, the readers will stop reading my story and leave. Once they leave, I know they may not be coming back. And when that happens, it’s going to be my loss. This is not good for my credibility.
Besides clarity, the flow and structure of the story must be smooth too. Smooth and understandable. Once the readers understand the flow of the story and once they noticed that there are smooth ‘handshakes’ between one paragraph to another, then they will realise that they do not need to try hard to understand where the story is going and what’s next. From here, they will stay with the story till the end.
Conclusion
That’s right, these are the entire step-by-step process of creating a quality 2,000-word article regime I’m using it since 2015 till today. To tell you the truth, I don’t really know any other method besides this one. It suits me perfectly well.
If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re using content as your marketing approach, then I would recommend you consider outsourcing the writing part to a third party. Do not write blogs yourself. Why? Simply because you need to work on your business, not in. If you focus too much on the latter, then you’re not being productive, unless you have a team to run the business. The writing gig will consume you as you will spend more time with your laptop writing articles day-in-day-out when you’re supposed to grow your business.
There is another tactic I like to use to get more quality articles without having to write too often. The tactic is called user-generated content or UGC. Some people call it guest writing. This is how UGC works. I will find a friendly party such as acquaintances, business partners, friends and colleagues to write and publish on my website. Since the article’s quality matters, I would need to filter the right people who can really write, convince them to write for me, encourage them to send the article based on a reasonable amount of time agreed, review their submission thoroughly first before publishing them, pay them a reasonable fee and finally publish the article.
The other tactic that many writers use is AI tools. Some of the top brands include Jasper, CopyAI, Rytr and INK Editor. The good thing about these AI tools is that you’re able to complete one 2,000-word article in just a matter of minutes. The setback is that you may need to spend time humanising those paragraphs to ensure they do not sound robotic and plain vanilla.
There you go, this is how I am doing it right now. And I lay some other strategies that I see other people are doing it too so that you’re able to understand better.
Your call.
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