I used to write my blogs very quickly. I have no particular background in writing, other than the fact that I write many emails, and have written a few how-to books for my clients who appreciate my knowledge, but don’t care for my spelling mistakes! You can’t please everyone. But, in the last few years, I discovered the joy of blogging. It is very fulfilling to me as well as being a huge marketing plus for my various web sites. I estimate that 40% of my main site’s traffic is a result of the SEO benefits of blogging! Huge!!!
In any case, I started working with professional writers recently.
I found that there is a huge difference between occupational bloggers and professional writers. The level of writing is much higher if you get someone with an academic background, or someone who is/was a professional screen writer for television. I started doing what I call collaborative blogging with two writers. I pride myself on my ability to write 2-6 interesting blog articles per hour. That is very fast! But, when I work with the professionals, it takes two people at least 45 minutes together to finish one piece. That is 1.5 man hours. There was one article which was very long about a date between a notary (me) and a girl. This took three hours of two people working together by phone. It was a huge hit, but boy what a lot of time.
So, which is better, writing quickly, or taking your time and making it perfect?
I learned that my quick and dirty style of writing had many spelling errors. I also learned that there was a lot of room for refinement of the ideas, restructuring, and bringing more juice out of each idea. I also learned that refinement takes forever! According to my blog stats, the quick blogs maintained my blog traffic, but there was not much growth. When I had one or two really thoughtful entries per week, we got better overall growth in our total blog repeat traffic. Interesting facts to know if you do analytics. I decided that doing a blend of fast blogs and slow blogs was the best way to populate the daily entries in a blog. But, there is one more thing that I learned.
5 minute blogs teach you which titles do well
I learned that it is not about quantity, or even quality when you do blogging. It is about matching the interests of your readers. If you write a quick piece about something that your readers really want to read, they will click on it, and even like it, even if it is not the best written article. If something quick is popular, you can do variations on a theme next time, and put more thought into them. That way, your future articles will be about topics that are tried and tested, and you can spend an hour or more with a professional refining them and making them a joy to read.
Blogging is lots of fun, but you need to have a keen understanding of the strategical aspects of how to allocate your precious time and the time of your hired help!
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http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/07/10/1593/
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http://bpo.123outsource.net/2011/04/05/the-miracle-of-blogging/