How to Write a Blog Post in 20 Minutes or Less

This post originally appeared on Accounting Today, where Inovautus Consulting regularly contributes articles on marketing and sales for accounting firms.

Let’s face it, blogging takes time. Whether your blog generates revenue or is simply a marketing tool for your business, all bloggers could use to get out great content faster. The faster we can produce GREAT content, the more money we make. Here are 4 tips for how to writer better content more quickly.

Have a process.

Great writing starts with a great process. A process helps focus you and more importantly it gets you in right mindset. Any process needs to involve reading. Each week, I aggregate tons of cotent and scan it. As I read, it triggers ideas. I jot down those ideas into a master list. Then, each month I refer back to that list and pick the top 3 or 4 ideas that jump out at me to write on.

Have one message.

Blogging is much easier if you have one message or point you are trying to get across. While in-depth content is good for a website, when it comes to blogging, short and sweet is best. If you are struggling to write a post, you may be trying to say too much.

Write and then edit.

Many of us were trained in grade school to write and rewrite and outline and organize. Writing quickly means getting everything out and then going back to edit. The more you stop to change things, the longer it will take you to get your ideas on paper on the higher chance of disrupting your flow of thought.

Format later.

The beauty of a blog is that most of the formatting can be done for you when you post. You shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time making it look fancy if you have a good style sheet on your blog.

I blog religiously every month and guest post/author for several publications. On average, I aim for each post to take 20 minutes or less. By following some of the suggestions above, you too can spend less than 90 minutes a month creating 4 blog posts.