Publishing new content is hard. You have to think of an idea, write out the content, do research, optimize the post, and schedule it. What about if you publish 1 new blog post every day? That’s a completely different ballgame.
At one point, I published 1 blog post every 12 hours. The blog posts were much shorter, and I didn’t prepare nearly as much as I have been. There are many steps that I take even after I’ve written the content.
I didn’t take those extra steps before, and those extra steps hurt my publishing frequency. I went from two blog posts per day to daily blog posts. Daily blog posts became weekly blog posts and then inconsistency followed.
I thought to myself, “This is okay. It’s just a growing process. I need to focus on other revenue generating opportunities and not spend as much time writing blog posts.”
The Awakening
After I took a long look at my content brand and read Flip The Funnel by Joseph Jaffe, I realized I over-prioritized customer acquisition. If you focus too much on customer acquisition, you forget to continue providing a better experience for current customers.
I realized that I needed a customer-centric brand, and writing daily blog posts allows me to create a better experience. The experience you provide also happens to be one of the seven pillars of customer centricity. With this new knowledge and my dream to turn Breakthrough Success into a daily podcast, I returned to daily blog posts.
The Big Flaw
At the beginning of 2017, I set the goal of publishing one new YouTube video every day. There were far more steps to go from idea to published video than from idea to published blog post. I embarked on this challenge, and stayed consistent for almost two months. I then dropped back down to weekly videos and eventually become inconsistent.
There is a fatal flaw that prevents content creators from reaching the status where they can publish 1 new blog post every day. A lack of time isn’t that fatal flaw.
The fatal flaw is this: You need to be writing new content every day.
Yann Girad wrote a fascinating article on Medium about how he wrote a blog post every day for two years. In that article, he explained the mindset that leads to disaster:
“Maybe because if you say you want to do it on Monday and Thursday you still have five excuses left. You’d still have Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday as an excuse. So if you still have Tuesday, why do it on Monday? And if you still have Wednesday why do it on Tuesday?”
If you don’t write every day, you risk falling into this mindset where you backlog the work. You then say that you’ll write this week’s blog posts on Sunday because you’re loaded with work for the other six days. Sunday comes around and you get busy. None of the blog posts get written.
What About Content Batching?
With that said, I’ve been a big advocate for content batching, a process in which you consistently choose a certain day of the week to create all of your content. John Lee Dumas blew me away with this concept when he said he does all of the EOFire interviews in two days.
EOFire is a daily podcast, so he’s interviewing 28-31 people over the span of two days. He can dedicate the rest of his month to other areas of his brand.
At first glance, content batching seems to lead people towards the fatal flaw. I’ll get all of my content done on this day of the week so I can do other things for the rest of the week.
The moment I attempt to content batch blog posts and videos, I find myself on the path towards inconsistency. I miss a day, and since each day carries much more weight in a content batching strategy, my consistency falls apart.
However, you can batch other parts of your brand and even content creation itself. While batching doesn’t work for my blog posts and videos, content batching works just fine for my podcast interviews. I only interview people on Tuesdays and Wednesdays unless I need to make a special exception.
That means for the other five days of the week, I can focus on other areas of my content brand. It’s also easier for me to write blog posts during these five days. On Monday, I can write a blog post and do some extra planning so it’s easier for me to squeeze in the blog post on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
You can use this approach to theme your days to boost your productivity. This method will allow you to accomplish your goals and stay in a constant state of flow. Jack Dorsey uses this method to run both Twitter and Square.
Write Blog Posts With THIS
When people think about daily blog posts, they think, “Well, that’s great, but I don’t have enough time.”
I can refute that excuse in so many ways, but I’ll share a powerful hack that works wonders. You can write blog posts on your smartphone.
When you’re waiting for anything or anyone (public transportation, watching advertisements before the movie starts, etc.), you can write some more content for an upcoming blog post. I’ve written dozens of blog posts with this one method.
I didn’t make any changes to my schedule. I just utilized time that was normally wasted. I don’t want to even think about how many extra hours it would have taken me to write those blog posts if I didn’t write them on my smartphone.
Don’t Make Them Perfect
I don’t spend much time in the editing process. At the most, I’m looking for places to insert more links to past blog posts and valuable articles on the web.
It’s okay if your blog has a typo. As long as your blog post is valuable, people will overlook the typo. As you write more blog posts, the value will come natural. You’ll think of the ideas and sentences much faster.
If you find yourself analyzing the same sentence over and over again, you need to move on. The marketplace only rewards the ideas that get implemented, and to write a blog post every day, you need to do a lot of implementing.
I’d rather publish an imperfect blog post every day than never publish a perfect blog post. Even if you think it’s perfect, it’s not. Perfection is a myth, and the quicker you realize this, the easier it will be for you to write daily blog posts.
Delegate, Delegate, Delegate
Publish 1 new blog post every day…it sounds easy. The goal gets difficult when you factor in the other tasks within your business, and let’s not forget about life as a whole. Writing a blog post takes less than an hour, but so many things compete for our attention.
The best time hack I’ve come across is delegating various tasks within your brand. There are a plethora of necessary tasks for my brand that I don’t perform. If I still had those obligations, I wouldn’t be writing a blog post every day.
Create a list of all of the necessary tasks you perform for your brand. Any task that you don’t enjoy performing is subject to delegation. I recommend you start by delegating the most time consuming task first and then go from there.
You can make the revenue back by optimizing your blog to gather more email subscribers and then optimizing the autoresponders to generate more sales.
Establish A Routine
Yann’s Medium article from before inspired this one, so I don’t want too much overlap. The final tactic I’ll mention is that you need to establish a routine. I’ve tried a variety of writing methods. Here’s the method I’m currently sticking with:
#1: Outline The Blog Post The Night Before. My outline looks very simple but gets the job done. I just identify the blog post’s title and the tactics I’ll cover.
#2: Research Some Relevant Articles The Night Before. This research is based on the outline.
#3: Write The Blog Post In The Morning. I do some research as I am writing the blog post when an idea floats in my mind. Some bloggers prefer to wait to do this extra research after writing the blog post (the internet can distract you from your work). I prefer to get the research over with so I’m not thinking about it as I’m writing the blog post.
#4: Schedule The Blog Post In The Afternoon Or Evening. I prefer scheduling blog posts on the same day I write them. I always have a buffer of blog posts scheduled in advance in case I can’t schedule a blog post on a particular day. I’m okay with batching this method, but I am no longer okay with batching the writing process.
I no longer write more than one blog post each day. If I have a burning desire, I’ll craft the outline and intentionally ignore the burning desire. Surprise, surprise, the burning desire only builds, and I have no problem writing tomorrow’s blog post.
Consider your schedule as you write and plan out blog posts. Since I batch my podcast interviews on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I’ll use Mondays to write more detailed outlines for the Tuesday and Wednesday blog posts.
For a more detailed outline, I do everything in the simple outline but also write the introduction and conclusion.
In Conclusion
Publishing a new blog post every day isn’t easy. However, there are many content creators proving that it’s possible every day.
Writing blog posts doesn’t just help with acquiring more leads, but daily blog posts will also strengthen the relationship between you and the audience you’ve already built.
What were your thoughts on this content creation approach? Do you have any questions for me? Sound off in the comments section below.