Three Simple Hints To Help You Write
- The more you write the better you get, and the faster
- Brainstorm your subject by just uncritically getting everything on paper
- Read your writing aloud or have your computer read if for you
The Bootstrapping Ethos
If you’re an independent professional, small business owner or a startup founder it’s likely you’re trying to do the impossible to begin with. You know you’ll only succeed by putting a massive superhuman effort. You are going to have to do so many different things because when you have other people do them they bill you a huge amount of money.
So, you learn to be a public speaker, a software programmer and a graphic designer. You also have to do some content writing. It can be one of the most intimidating things to attempt to find your voice and get your ideas written down. The good news is that, as the force behind an entity such as a business or non-profit, it’s a given that you have ideas and energy. Regardless of your writing skills or your academic record you have the kind of drive that makes for good writing.
Your readers are looking for insight and information and they will forgive you for not keeping your verb forms parallel or your point of view consistent. Search engines don’t look at that sort of thing either. Again, what the entire audience is after is after, both human and machine, is information that can be put to use in service to their own agendas.
How Much Is Enough For A Blog Post?
The more you write the better you get, and the faster. Writing gets easier as you go. When you are putting ideas on paper on paper or in a digital file they will lead you on to the next point that you want to make.
- 300 words is the minimum to be taken seriously by search engines
- There’s no upper limit just try to be concise
Unless you have a lot of high value information, you can keep blog posts at around five hundred words. This pleases Google and Bing and it’s enough to make a point or two, include an introduction and a summing up at the end. If you do that once a week you will gradually build up a library of content about your business.
If you can write 150 words you can write 450 words. Hint: You can write 150 words.
Rough Writers Get Better Results By Editing Later
Brainstorming your content is the simple process of letting your ideas flow onto the page or screen. Write uncritically until you have covered enough material for your post and then go back and review, revise and edit once its out there.
It’s always easier to fine-tune a rough article after it’s written but difficult to do that first draft if you are critiquing it in your head as you go. So just withhold criticism until after you are satisfied that you have enough material to cover the topic. Quality comes from later refinement.
You may have noticed that I have referred to content writing as putting ideas on paper, well as digital form. I wrote that because for some people, the physical act of writing is part of the creative process. Not everyone is a typist and the most important step is recording your ideas, and worrying about editing and proofreading after the fact.
Hack Your Hearing To Refine Your Editing
It can be a big help to listen to the content writing you’ve produced. When you speak the draft of your post aloud many of the mistakes, missed words and grammatical errors will jump out at you. This doesn’t mean that you have to make it perfect, just make it sound right to you and you’ll find that it’s easy to read for your audience.
If you are putting your writing directly into a digital file, your computer or tablet can read it to you aloud. If you use an Apple computer just highlight the text and select the option and escape keys. For Windows users there are speech to text applications that do the same.
College Grads Usual Know This Secret
Finally, the philosopher Aristotle had a secret trick that has been taught in colleges ever since. If you want to know what it was click here. You can use this simple trick to pad your writing but still be authentic.
Don’t be afraid of writing a blog post or getting content down on paper. The more you do of it the better you will get. Write uncritically in your first draft and you will be surprised how easy it is to edit that into a polished, publishable post. Either read it a loud to yourself or have a text-to-speech application read aloud for you.
Written content is vital to small business owners these days and you don’t have to break the bank to get it. These simple tricks will help you get started with content writing and posting to your website or what ever platform is the place that your audience finds you.
