Write fast: 5 genius tips that worked for me

Writing great content and more of it can help you stay on track with deadlines and to grow your blog traffic quicker! There’s just one problem…nobody has infinite time to do it. In this post we’ll learn how to write fast, without sacrificing quality – these are the 5 best tips that actually worked for us.

How many times did you start writing, wait a second, not even start, but think of staring to write when something came up and you decided now it’s not the time, we're gonna do it later?

First of all, we complement you on this decision, let future you handle that content. She’s got time and she writes FAST.

Second: This has never happened to us, because we can do it all. And we will teach you how to do it as well.

Except, we're lying and we're also one of the most unproductive people we know.

It took us days to get out a good blog post (if any) out. We knew people recommended to batch write blog posts, but we couldn’t do it.

Whenever we tried we fell miserably. We were constantly thinking about creating content and by the end of the month we would have like 5 articles, even though our mind was occupied the whole time with this and we were stressed.

Which we dislike much.

But the good news is: even we found a way to get out of this rut and was able to write 3 blog posts a day last year. And that whole effort paid off.

Because within 2 months we tripled our traffic, thanks to exactly the blog posts we wrote then and we still get traffic from those blog posts.

Before: Our blog traffic in May

After: Our blog traffic in July

Now. When we say write 3 blog posts a day we don’t actually mean write 3 blog posts every day and post them right away.

Content matters and creating enough good content, fast enough, is important when it comes to growing your blog.

After all, when you create a blog post you don’t want to just post it & leave it. You’ll need time to promote it, to create the potentially viral pins, find more ways to grow as a blogger and well and to find some time to also live your life.

(And people say building a house is hard, try blogging you complainer)

So here are the 5 tips we found helped us write fast, so we can stay consistent with blogging and grow our traffic.

How To Write Fast

1. Don’t Let Your Dreams Ruin Your Life.

We heard this from author Cheryl Strayed and words cannot explain how much we appreciate her expressing this so well.

Cheryl describes how when she started writing her novel years ago felt so much pressure to write the great American novel, that she just couldn’t write a word. And then she realized she needs to simply write and finish this book, and it doesn’t even matter whether someone else reads it.

We've slowly learned to let go, stay honest and write like we would write if nobody was reading. For us. As we would to a close friend. With no censorship to what we say and what we don’t say. We are not on TV. We are not sponsored by a huge faceless corporation. The posts that we succeed to write like this are the most successful ones.

2. Know It

Now this tip we read on Rachel Aaron’s blog. She’s a writer who can write 10.000 words a day. If you’re wondering how much 10.000 words are…well it’s a lot. A small book on Kindle is around 3.000 words.

Rachel says there are three things she needs to be able to write this fast with the high quality that she writes: time, knowledge and excitement.

By knowledge she says it’s knowing what she’s going to write about. Therefore she makes a detailed outline of the scene she’s going to write, before starting to write.

We started doing this with our posts and it allows us to see whether we need a certain part in there or not. If it doesn’t make sense – we remove it. If we don’t feel like it adds something new and helpful – we get rid of it.

Knowing what you’re going to write about also helps you stick to what you want to write later.

Many times we would start writing something and then our post ends up being something completely different from what we intended it to be. We still turn it into a different post, but whenever we outline and stick to the outline our posts flow easier and we don’t get distracted and this helps us dig deeper and actually solve the problem we're working on.

Things we add in our outline include:

• Intro – what’s this post about, what are the benefits of doing this, what story can we tell
• How to do it – outline each step in bullet points
• Where we need to add pictures
• Closing/takeaways

If you’re interested in reading Rachel’s full strategy on how she went from 2.000 to 10.000 words a day, check out her post here.

3. Go WIFI-less

We don’t know if it’s the same for you, but we write much more focused and faster when we write on paper.

Why?

Well we don’t know, but our guess: LESS distractions.

But, because nobody can read our writings on the notebook, we need to write things on the computer. And this spirals into checking for synonyms, facts on google or wikipedia, watching youtube videos, looking for stock photos, editing them or in the case of writing a health post: original research articles and pubmed.

And there, 6 hours and we still haven’t finished or even started to write.

Solution is simple: WIFI off. You only have the one page you’re writing and if you stick to the outline, well friend – you’re gonna write blazing fast. Or faster than before. (we also saw this tip in Rachel Aaron’s post but it was something we noticed doing myself when we wrote from wherever we didn’t have internet)

Another awesome thing we found is a free site called zenpen.io. Which is a distraction-free writing site where you have a blank page and you write. Although we don’t always use it, it works wonders if you haven’t written in a while and need to start. Just start, okay?

4. Say TK

We are forever grateful to the author of this post on Smartblogger, because the tip about writing tk wherever you need a source saves us about millions of hours.

Just so you know, this post is now full of tk’s before editing.

Why?

Tk is not a common letter combination in English and when you write it wherever you need additional information in your post you don’t need to multitask to find sources while you write (and this takes us FOREVER).

You also don’t need to reread your post over and over again to see where you need to add links, sources or an image. When you write tk in place of a source, link or image (or whatever you need to add to your post after you’ve already written it) it’s simple to find that place after you’ve finished your post.

Just hit the find function and write tk and search through the post. Then add everything you need to, delete the tk’s and you’re done. It’s a new life.

5. Don’t Edit While You Write

This kinda goes back to tip #1, but editing while you write will cost you a ton of time and the result is an article that’s all over the place. At least that’s the way it’s for us.

Whenever we keep going back and changing small things in our draft, even a 300 word post takes us 2-3 hours to write (and it’s not a science one!).

So stop trying to make things solid from the first draft. Realize it’s just this: a draft. Say what you need to say and then after you’re finished – polish it, make it great when it’s actually time to edit. Then hit publish or schedule. Even if you write the most horrible thing in your first draft, you can always edit it later.

We usually edit one or two days after we've written the draft to see whether this makes sense or not.

Okay. Now these are the tips that helped us write faster than we did before and to stay consistent with our blog, so we can triple our traffic.

We do hope they help you too, but also, do let us know if you have any other tips for writing quicker! We're always looking for ways to write better and faster (we mean nobody’s got time, right?).