When was the last time you forced your eyes onto a glaring screen at 4am, furiously typing after just waking up with the best idea ever?
Last night? Never? Well, neither answer is surprising. As I suspected (yet can now say with complete certainty) content writers are an odd mix between two types of people:
- Charles Bukowski hammering at his typewriter with classical music blaring through the radio
- A strait-laced data nerd, carefully analyzing keywords and writing content that has been proven to engage before it even hits Twitter.
While readers think of content in terms of ‘video’, ‘infographic’ and ‘blog post’, we writers think of it as that damn thing which keeps us up at night. So much so that Ed Fry, general manager at Inbound.org, has started writing short-form posts to get the idea out of his head and allow for a proper night’s sleep.
A recent thread at Inbound.org revealed excellent tips which both shared new ideas with me and reassured me that I’m not wrong in the head.
In the discussion, members of the Inbound community like Mention’s Brittany Berger and SplashOPM’s Derric Haynie share their blogging process – both step-by-step (for the more ‘together’ writers) and free-form rambling-style.
In this post, I’ve collated and curated the information to give you an overview of how successful and prolific content writers go from idea, to draft to finished piece.
I’ll also be taking careful note of the way I write this post, and give you a bullet-pointed rundown at the end.
Which text editors do bloggers use, exactly? Should you write to educate or provoke discussion? How far in advance should you plan your content? Let’s find out.
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