In a recent exchange with a budding freelance writer, I said something to the effect of if you aren’t writing every day then you aren’t maximizing your potential as a professional freelance writer.
We were discussing the lack of updates on his writing website and my point was that by posting something every single day, you get a lot of advantages.
First, writing every day builds your writing portfolio faster. Just do the math. If you post an article on your blog every day for a month, you will have 30 articles published. If you post every other day, you’ll only have 15, and if you post once per week, you’ll only have four.
The number of articles published matters for many reasons.
Google will respect and rank your articles higher if there are more than a handful. Webmaster forums are filled with talk about the demise of so-called micro-sites. More posts also means more chances to "hit" topics that people are searching for. If you write 100 articles about dog collars, sooner or later, you might start getting hundreds of hits per day because you wrote about plain blue leather dog collars without studs when no one else has. How long would it take you to get around to writing that article rather than low ranking general articles at a rate of two per week versus a rate of one per day?
More articles means more writing samples viewable for people deciding whether to hire you. It also demonstrates a commitment to writing. If you publish once per day for your own website, it is much more likely that you will keep up with the same pace for a client. Many writers start out as prolific publishers only to drop off once all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. If you can write every day about dog collars then you should have no trouble writing a weekly column about pet supplies.
Just as important, is that more writing means more practice. The only way to work on your craft is to write. You can read until you are blue in the face, but the only way you will ever end up looking to see whether it is every day or everyday is if you need to know for sure. Publishing something with your name on it, to your own website, for all the world to see, especially potential clients, has a way of making you not want to look like a fool.
By the way, everyday is an adjective, as in, everyday suit rather than the suit you wear for special occasions.
Every day is an adverb, as in, you should write every day.
Do you know how to use everyone versus every one? (Hint: It’s pretty much the same.)
Writing Practice What You Preach
The conversation came to a screeching halt when he pointed out that I (lately) publish rather infrequently here on my own freelance writing blog at ArcticLlama.com.
Ouch.
In all fairness, I have several websites and I also have several paying clients, so it isn’t like I’m not writing every day, but this is MY own website where I write about something I love, which also happens to be important to my freelance writing business.
Even though it may not be as important for me to write on my website every day because both I and it are already established, it certainly could not hurt. Furthermore, everything above is still 100 percent true whether you have been writing for one week, one year or one decade.
Thus, my new commitment is to practice what I preach. See you with a new article tomorrow… and the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that, and …