Writing every day is the hallmark of a professional, or passionate, writer. By writing every day, you continuously hone your writing skills, keep your creative juices flowing, and even end up typing faster. One day, someone comes over from three cubicles away and just stares until you notice.
"How fast do you type?" they will ask.
You won’t have any idea that you type fast until you look up some internet website where they have a typing test that counts how many words per minute you type. Of course, that number will be low, because there is a very big difference between typing what you are reading on a screen and typing words that are coming from your own head. Either way, the number will be surprising.
On the other hand, blogging every day can be harder.
The main difficulty in blogging is that unless you have some sort of smorgasbord of topics website to blog on, there isn’t always going to be something that pops into your head that is worth writing. For example, my website Best Hubris (yes, it’s deliberately funny… if you really understand what hubris means) is sort of my catch-all website where I write mostly about business strategy and technology, but also about personal development, thinking, and other stuff.
Here, on my freelance writing blog, the topic list is rightfully smaller. It is made even smaller by the fact that this particularly writing blog is blatantly attached to my freelance writing business. In other words, what appears here needs to be appropriate for me and my business, lest it turn prospective clients and colleagues into disinterested passerby.
My recent, perhaps foolish, commitment to writing HERE everyday could be difficult to manage. I’m a professional freelance writer, but I’m also a work at home dad and a husband whose schedule revolves, by choice, around my family. Finding time to handle the projects and deadlines for paying gigs and then writing something that is both valuable and on-topic for the ArcticLlama blog could be difficult.
There is, however, a wonderful technique that will, eventually, make posting an article on my writing website every day easy.
Writing Ahead
If you are serious about posting every day, you either have to commit time every day, or you have to write ahead.
Writing ahead is surprisingly simple these days. If you have a WordPress blog (which you should, that will be a later post) you can set the post date on each blog entry you write. By writing tomorrow’s post tonight and setting it to publish tomorrow, I can ensure that there is a daily entry here not only today, but tomorrow.
If my schedule works out tomorrow, I’ll write another post anyway and schedule it for the next day. If I can write two posts, then I can schedule the next two days, and so on until I have 30 or 40 days prewritten. At that point, I can commit to updating some of my other blogs daily using the same technique.
Don’t worry about being topical unless you are a news blog. I don’t write about fads or one-day wonders here. Furthermore, much of writing is rather static. Sure, in order to make money writing online you have to keep up with rapidly changing topics, but what was AP Style yesterday will be correct AP Style next month and next year in most cases.
Do you use any techniques to keep up with your writing or publishing?