Last week, Henri Junttila from Wake Up Cloud wrote The Homeless Blogger’s Guide to Procrastination on the Not A Pro Blog.
It was a funny and witty look at how we as bloggers waste so much time viewing stats, reading countless other blogs and petting animals instead of doing what we actually should do.
One of the most interesting things to come out of this post for me was the fact that Henri claimed he wrote the post in just 5 minutes! Talk about the exact opposite of procrastination! The guy practically sets his keyboard alight when he types.
With that in mind I decided to try and put Henri’s theory to the test. So here I am, typing like a mad man, trying to get something that is borderline legible, informative and entertaining in around 5 minutes.
So, without further ado: my quick guide to writing a blog post in just 5 minutes.
- Don’t worry about formatting. You need to type like your life depends on it! This means no punctuation, no bullet lists, no headings. Nothing. Just get the words down. Spelling? Forget about it!
- Know what you’re writing in advance. I spend a lot of time thinking about the post I’m going to write before I write it. It helps to know exactly what you’re going to discuss before you write and exactly what points you want to get across.
- Don’t procrastinate! Whatever you do, if you want to write a blog post in 5 minutes, then you can’t stop to think about anything else. Immerse yourself in the moment because the second you stop to think about what it is you’re typing, you’ll forget the point and spend valuable time trying to remember what the hell you were trying to say!
- Know your topic. As a follow on from knowing what you’re going to write about, you need to know a bit about the topic you intend to write about too. I could write a 5 minute article on Manchester United any day of the week but if you asked me to knock up an article on Quantum Physics it would take me the better part of a decade to understand the concepts before I can even attempt to put my own opinion on them.
- Don’t worry about perfection. The big boys in blogging will tell you all about doing draft copies and rewording it to make the article more “link-baity” and what-not. Don’t worry about this. Just get something written down as fast as your little hands can type. You can tidy it up once the content has been written. So many people waste hours tweaking the title of an article when what they should do is JHP FFS!
- Stop trying to find the perfect image! When I wrote the 100 Great Movies Every Guy MUST See (not my site anymore, may not be SFW) , I must have spent a good 3 hours alone on finding the exact picture I wanted. It has to be the right quality, the right dimensions, everything! Why? Nobody really cares about the pictures as long as your content is killer (which it wasn’t! ha). Stop worrying about making your blog post look pretty. A picture doesn’t speak a thousand words in the blogosphere!
The really quick conclusion to the really quick post
In summary, just start writing about whatever topic is in your head and try to not stop typing for a good 5 minutes. If you follow the points above, I bet you’ll have something that is pretty decent to hit “Publish” on.
“But how long did this post take you?”, I hear you cry!
Well I guess I’m no Henri Junttila and I should change the article title to “How to Write a Blog Post in 12 Minutes & 54.3 Seconds or Less” because this article took me 12 minutes and 54.3 seconds:
However, I got a pretty great article out of less than 15 minutes work and 700 words in less than 15 minutes is impressive. (53.8 words per minute while trying to think of the content isn’t a bad benchmark!) Try and get a post on your blog today in 5 minutes or less and post your really quick article link in the comments so I can see what you’ve come up with!
(Disclaimer: I spent 5 minutes, and only 5 minutes, tidying up the content and creating a semi-relevant image for the post. Please do not flame me as a liar, scoundrel or cheat. I get enough of that from my Mrs! Oh, and the words in this disclaimer have not been counted towards my word count or subsequent WPM average. Cool?)
I think there’s a lot for every blogger to learn from here Ian. Nice job
We try so hard to make each post perfect so our content is amazing that we forget what’s important….like the words and the point we’re trying to make.
When I start blogging I used to write in Word or the editor in WordPress itself. It would take me an hour or so to write each post. Now I use Write Monkey which is a no nonesense text editor that goes full screen and removes the UI when your writing so you can concentrate on just that, writing. Now I can get a post written in around 20 minutes. Not quite near 5 minutes as I still get distracted by Twitter.
I’ll have to check Write Monkey and see how I fair without all the distractions.
You’re right, we do try to make each post perfect and I’ve been very guilty in the past of that. I used to write huge articles, list posts and so on pretty quickly and then I’d spend hours editing and changing words because it felt like I hadn’t spent enough time creating the content. Why? What I’d written was good but I had these preconceptions about how long a post should take and I made myself feel guilty if I didn’t put enough time into it.
20 minutes is still good for a post from start to finish, though!
Sometimes I can manage to churn out a blog post in a few minutes. But usually I take a few days. I like to do quite a bit of research behind my articles. Currently I have about 10 articles on the go and in various stages.
Yeah, not all articles should be knocked up in a couple of minutes and sometimes research needs to be done before you start.
10 articles on the go is crazy. Thank goodness you’ve got a great reminder system to keep it all in line!
BTW: I’ve been reading your blog and really enjoy your writing. Thanks a bunch for stopping by!
For me this is really hard! I need time to express my ideas without being boring, and some time to correct what I’ve written. All this without considering previous research. I have to admit tough that I spend a lot of times finding images
I think over time you naturally get faster at creating content anyway. I guess you have to also figure out how to say what you want to say in a different language which can’t make it easy to create fast blog posts.
I used to spend literally hours finding images for blog posts and it was the biggest source of my blogging frustration. When I set myself a time limit of just 5 minutes to find an image, I stopped being so picky and started to choose simple images instead. My frustration vanished and I regained my love for writing!
Yes, absolutely. One of the major challenges for me is still to express clearly what I mean. Fortunately I’m becoming better at it day after day, thanks to continuous practice.
If your blog posts are anything to go by, then you’re definitely expressing yourself quite clearly!
Thanks for the link dude!
I think this post was awesome and I want to emphasize the point of knowing what you’re going to write before hand. I brainstorm and outline my posts as much as possible fore I start writing.
This helps me keep my articles focused and sharp, as best as I can. What I’ve come to realize is that not every article is going to be a masterpiece and there are some days where my writing doesn’t flow. We just have to keep writing and do our best to rock!
Absolutely! If you can get the article together in your minds eye first, it makes it so much easier to write it.
Sometimes the words don’t want to come out and in those situations I’ll work on something else like commenting on blogs or catching up on some language learning. You can always rock the writing again later, right?
Agreed!
Writing the title or bullet points first helps me to write quickly. As silly as it might sound. I’ve heard you should think up a title last, but when I have an idea coming up with the great title helps me keep my writing focused and allows me to get to the point quicker.
I always heard that you should write the title last too, but for me, if I can brainstorm a good title name first then I can flesh it out much more quickly and it becomes something much more coherent and legible.
If I try and write without a set title or topic, it becomes an explosion of words and I ramble through a lot of random points that don’t even touch the topic I wanted to cover in the first place!
I have to say I agree here but I also want to point out that time doesn’t necessarily matter, or shouldn’t. Just write and write and write and make sure you have a good point and you’re helping someone in some way or at the least, providing valuable content to your readers.
I fully understand the concept here is to just write and not worry about all the other distractions and such that come about as you write, but putting a time on it, unless you absolutely have to will only make it harder in my opinion as you’re trying to beat the close instead of trying to provide something with meaningful value.
Now something just to see if it can be done in so much time to better yourself for practice is cool.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not disagreeing with you I’m just saying that you can write something out fast… Putting a time on it doesn’t necessarily make it a great thing though.
What do you think?
I don’t normally time myself when I’m writing an article, this was just to see if I could as a test.
I do think that the points can still be used by people looking to get more done in less time but clock watching should only be used occasionally to benchmark how much quicker you’re getting at writing.
Ian,
I also think this could come in handy for reading books as well. Not something to focus on daily but once in a while just to see where you’ve come from and how far you’re going.