In my prior post, I outlined some straightforward steps for getting started for a little less than $40 for the first month, and how to get the first draft of your first post established.
This is not like the days of my working at Capital City Press in Berlin, VT – where the content was physically produced in book, magazine, and other forms of analog output. Times have changed, and we can all produce content without having to have a guy feeding the binder machine or stacking pallets at 11pm at night. I’ve done both.
I prefer the online content game…
Now that you have your first draft, what is next?
Well, there are numerous resources online and guides that if you throw down some Google searches – I’m sure you will find some resources that you will find useful.
Let me start off by saying, I’m not consistently writing 1000 words a day, although this is a goal of mine. One of the main reasons for this 84 day journey is to get the benefits of a daily writing habit that will someday envelope and surpass the 1000 word threshold.
At this point of my journey, I am shooting for a daily writing habit where I’m creating content to be shared at a later date of my choosing. I’ll outline some of the benefits in a bit – first – let’s talk a little bit more about my journey before the 84 days announcement that I made a week or two back.
The Journey Before The 84 Days
I started writing for the first time in over a decade on a daily basis in early 2017, as I began to cultivate a journaling habit. It was many times a few sentences jammed into my Evernote, and it was almost always tied to my family activities.
Later in the year, I began writing my journal into a physical journal that truly helped to destress my entire lifestyle as I designed my days in advance via my physical journal/schedule.
Then I decided to get another project launched, prior to this personal site, and set about to publishing twice a week with an intention to write twice a week. It was choppy at best, I was averaging 4-5 days a week of creating content with two editing windows during the week. The quality of my writing continued to increase and the clarity of thinking continued to improve.
Then my writing habit began to atrophy in the new year, and my ‘content buffer’ began to shrink slowly – week over week.
Then writer’s block began to creep in.
Motivation waned, discipline faltered.
Then I decided to go for the 84 Days challenge for a variety of reasons, with one of the main motivators was developing a true habit for content creation. My word is on the line, and online now.
84 Days of Daily Production
So here is where the actionable approaches can be leveraged for continuing your journey to finding your voice.
Content Creation – Writing: Set aside some amount of time to write with a target of some amount of words – 1000 words is not that big of a deal after you get into a rhythm. I am averaging just under an hour depending upon my energy and setting when I’m writing. Many times I’m exceeding 1000 words in my sessions.
This is your writing habit. Content creation is raw, many times choppy, and not the finished product. The point is to get the creative juices flowing and the content produced. You will be taking a chisel to get to the sculpted output in the next step.
Editing: Set aside some amount of time per week to perform editing. This is where you will pull up the prior content you’ve authored, and refine the points. Reduce the redundant language. Find the images and videos you want to use to enhance the article. Do not confuse your edit window with your content creation window. Editing for me takes at least an hour of solid time, and it is usually late at night when I’m most tired as I’m refining the existing thoughts that I’ve already produced. I like to let the articles sit and germinate at least two days before they get published. There are a number of articles that are getting worked in parallel, and who knows when they will see the time of day. This notion of publishing is the next step.
Publishing: Set aside some time each week to determine the articles you are going to publish. This window can also be used to do some light editing, typically this is where I’ll modify my publishing and content creation calendars. At a minimum, you need to be publishing once a week when you are ready to go public.
Ideation & Editorial Calendar: This notion of editorial calendars is a gift of a thought from Sean Wes, and it really has jumpstarted the 84 Days journey that I kicked off. I had landed in the writer’s block zone, and I was struggling many days to get the content started. So I would skip the content in the hopes that my motivation would return, or that my inspiration would strike mid set on a lift – which is ironically when some of my best ideas hit me – while I’m at the gym completely zen’d out with weights.
So ideation – what is that? It is simple really – it is capturing your ideas successfully so that you can elaborate on them at a later date. Ideas can be captured anywhere at any time. If you have a modern phone – you can capture them very very easily. I sometimes dictate the idea into my Evernote, other times I’ll type it in.
Capturing an idea for me follows this template:
- Idea Name
- Idea Description – one sentence summary of it
- Key Points to hit
- I’ll capture 3-5 sub points that can very easily be elaborated into a post or article
Once you have gotten into the habit of capturing your ideas in this manner into a Word doc, Google sheet, Evernote, or a simple email to yourself – you will now have a backlog of ideas to hit up.
What do you do with these ideas that are partially developed?
You calendar them as topics on your writing days, in advance, as part of your editorial calendar. If you are publishing twice a week for example, your edit windows will likely precede the publishing windows, and your writing windows could be 4 days a week. You simply calendar the ideas into those preset writing days/windows, and you crank.
A final thought for you. Writing does not need to be online initially, in fact, I’d recommend that you get at least a dozen articles/posts authored to give you some buffer so that you are not in a pressurized situation to produce content. Once you’ve cultivated the habits necessary to produce more content, that is of high quality, then perhaps you can ratchet up the schedule and public posture of your content and thoughts.
Again the point is to get started – even if you do not have the voice or full on motivation. I’ll be speaking to both topics in the next article.
