Episode Overview: Today on Episode 22, we’ll be talking about writing tips for bloggers. From preparation, topic choice and eliminating distractions.
Table of Contents
Writing Tips For Bloggers – Sandbox To Success Episode 22
If you’ve been blogging for a while, or maybe you just started, you know it’s now always easy to get a post out. Sometimes you can knock one out in 15 minutes and sometimes you find yourself just staring at the screen not knowing what to write. I’m here to give you a few tips to hopefully help you take that staring at the screen not being productive time and turn it into writing and being productive.
Getting Prepped
Know what you want to write about before you get started. Whether you are writing a personal post or a resource post… knowing your theme will help make your topic clear to your readers, as well as making the post more search engine optimized from the start. I’ve read (and written a few) articles where it appears that the author just wrote about whatever they wanted to write about at that time. Without cohesiveness and some sort of ending to the post, it makes it very hard for the reader to follow.
This theory applies just as much to a more personal post. If you want to write a post about the time you felt like you were the worst mother in the world… that’s your topic. You want to always write from that perspective. That little bit of preparation and foresight into knowing what you’re going to write about will help your writing immensely. It will help your readers and yourself know where you’re going with your topic and follow along.
Choosing a Topic
Sometimes it can be hard to find the topic and find something that works for you. When I’m feeling a little bit stuck, I go onto Pinterest and search for things that I might want to write about. Recently, I did a no waist campaign. I had no idea what I wanted to talk about, so I started searching “no waist” on Pinterest. I use Pinterest because it is my number 1 traffic referrer. I use it as a launching pad to see what is popular in that field and what others have come up with.
Of course, you never want to copy anyone else’s work… but you can take note of trends. Maybe you find that one subtopic in the category you like has tons of views, while another angle doesn’t have many. You may choose to take the path less traveled, or to choose the popular angle and try to do better than them! Either way, you can draft ideas from whatever site brings you the most traffic. If it’s Google, go there. If it’s Pinterest, go there. Search for whatever topic or idea you had and use them as a brainstorming tool.
Avoid Distractions
When you’re writing, try to write with as little distractions as possible. This can be hard. If you’re using WordPress, go to the top right-hand corner and you’ll see an “x” with little arrows. If you click on that it will maximize the writing space and minimize everything else. It’s called distraction free writing. This works for me, especially when I’m on a deadline. Putting up that barrier reminds me of what my task is and I can write it with little distractions.
Another good tip if you are a full-time blogger: Facebook is such a time suck. I can’t not be on Facebook because I need it for my job. The newsfeed, however, is a time killer. If you’re on Chrome, there’s a plugin called Facebook Eradicator. It hides the newsfeed and puts a little quote or something in its place. You still receive your messages and notifications, but you won’t be constantly refreshing your newsfeed. Until I started using this, I had no idea how much time I was spending browsing through my newsfeed.
