All posts by Ali Luke
7 Quick Tweaks That Could Make All the Difference to Your Blog Posts
You’ve finished your blog post—finally. You type the final few words, breathe a sigh of relief, and hit “publish.”
You might be making a big mistake.
I know how tempting it can be to hurry blog posts out into the world—especially when you’re busy and just getting the post written at all is a huge achievement.
Don’t worry: I’m not going to suggest that you spend hours trying to perfect your post (I’m a firm believer in “published is better than perfect”).
Instead, I have seven quick tweaks that could make all the difference to your post—and to the results you’ll get.
How to Write WAY More Words Per Hour (Without Sacrificing Quality)
Writers’ speeds vary … a lot.
Some writers would consider 100 words an hour to be a perfectly productive rate. Others would be disappointed by 1,000 words an hour.
Obviously, a fair part of this difference is to do with the type of writing they’re undertaking (literary novels tend to be considerably slower, per word, than genre fiction or chatty blog posts), but whatever type of writing you do, you can improve your speed.
Here’s how I know. When I was in college, I wrote a lot. I wrote essays, which I was fairly quick at because I had a good batch production system for them. During the (ridiculously long) vacations, I wrote fiction.
Now that I have two children and a packed life, I can’t quite understand why I didn’t produce a dozen novels while I was at college. (I managed one!) But a big part of the reason is probably because it often took me a whole day just to write 1,000 words.
These days, I can regularly hit 1,000–1,500 words per hour.
Why You Should Create Content in Batches (and How to Do It)
What is your process when you write a blog post or newsletter article?
For many professional writers, the answer goes something like this: They come up with an idea at 9 am, they sit down and write a plan by 9:30 am, they’re done with the draft by lunchtime, at some point in the afternoon they edit it … and they’re finished.
Sounds good, right? That method involves planning (which I’m a big fan of) and serious editing—not publishing a rough draft. What’s to criticize?
It’s an inefficient way to create content.
How to Build for the Future When You Need Money RIGHT NOW
One of the toughest challenges as a writer and entrepreneur is figuring out how to build for the future when you also need to keep money coming in steadily.
If you’ve got a day job in place, it may actually make things easier: you’ve got your day job income, and you’ve got your entrepreneurial side projects. If they don’t pay off straight away, it might be frustrating, but it’s not financially crippling.
But if you’re a full-time entrepreneur or freelancer, it can be a lot harder. You need to bring in enough money every month to pay the bills … no matter what. Maybe you’d never even contemplate turning down a paying client (even if they’re a poor fit, and even if you’ve already got enough work for the month). Quite possibly, you have a family to support; your income is what keeps food on the table.
Understandably, your priority is likely to be what’s happening right now: taking client calls, or writing freelance pieces, or pitching for new gigs.
You might dream of having other sources of income, like a book or online course, to take some of the pressure off. With a product out there, even if you don’t have many billable hours in a particular month, you’ll still have some money coming in. (You might even get to take a vacation.)
Finding the time to actually write that book or produce that ecourse, though, could feel almost impossible.
Well, it’s definitely not easy. But here’s a step by step plan that should help.