15 Time-Saving Blog Writing Tips | Productive Writing for Bloggers
To maintain a productive blog posting habit on your blog, follow these time-saving blog writing tips for an efficient, stress-free daily writing routine.
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Bloggers are always in a hurry. Those who think that we, bloggers, make easy money and should get a real job should try writing as many articles as we do per week. Nothing is more exhausting and time-consuming for bloggers than the blog writing process.
A 2015 report by the State of Inbound showed that most marketers take around 1-2 hours to write 500 words for a blog post.
By this logic, the blog writing process takes around 2.5 hours (not bad at all) to 6 hours (pretty bad for a 1500-word blog post) per article. It’s worth mentioning that this time does not include research time.
If you write, or this is your aim, 2-4 articles per week, each one being around 1500 words long, this may cost you more time than you have available or are willing to dedicate to your blog.
In such a scenario, following time-saving blog writing tips to speed up the writing process and reduce the blogging workload is the best way to go.
Read on for productive (and actually effective!) tips on how to write blog posts in less time.
Table of contents
- Finish the blog post research before starting
- List all the ideas to be covered in the blog post
- Define how many hours you will write per session
- Customize your workspace
- Set boundaries if you live with other people
- Block all distractions from social media
- Turn off the bad noise and turn on the good noise
- Find out what time your writing is most productive
- Get Grammarly to help with your writing
- Don’t worry too much about performance
- Reward yourself after you’ve finished
- Make copies of your progress
- Edit only after you have finished your writing
- Learn to let go
- Recycle content
- Bonus Tip: Never give blog writing a break
- Conclusion
15 Time-saving blog writing tips for productive writing
In ten years of working as a writer, first as a freelance writer, then as a full-time blogger, I realized that the environment in which I worked, heeded by some organizational issues, was consuming more of my time than writing itself.
However, a few changes make the writing routine much more productive. Check out these 15 blog writing tips to save time! After incorporating these writing hacks into your blogging routine, you’ll save hours and get more things done in less time.
1. Make sure to complete your blog post research before you start writing
To examine the competition and ensure that your article is as in-depth as possible, you will need to research to confirm the information and collect data to back up your claims.
Collecting all the information you need before starting your blog post is time-saving as it makes your writing faster and more dynamic.
When you constantly need to interrupt your writing to open the side tab and do research, you expose yourself to a rabbit hole of information.
It becomes easy to start reading studies outside of your blog post topic, get distracted by advertisements, and fall into the temptation to check emails or social media.
Limit your attention between yourself and whatever word processor software you use when blog writing.
The more distractions you have, the more you lose the thread, which makes the blog writing process more difficult than necessary.
2. List all ideas to be covered in the blog post prior to writing
Listing your ideas is probably one of the most effective time-saving blog writing tips.
When you list all the ideas to be discussed in your article, you save yourself the effort of having to think about what to write next. This saves you from the countless writer’s blocks that can appear as you write.
These blocks are responsible for those moments when you start to face the wall, thinking about nothing, trying to recover the logical thinking process to progress with your writing.
In your list, you must cover the main ideas for the entire structure of the article:
- The general topic of the article
- Introduction (perhaps already including the paragraph for the featured snippet)
- Subtitle 1
- Subtitle 2
- Subtitle 3
- Subtitle 4, 5, 6, etc
- Conclusion
- Call To Action (You decide which area is the most appropriate to include your CTA, it doesn’t have to be after the conclusion)
Also, don’t forget to include the SEO-optimization in your list! For example, write down the number of times the main keyword must appear according to your blog post length, use the main keyword and LSI keywords in your subtitles, etc. In case you don’t know which keywords to choose, you can use KWFinder to find the best keywords for your blog.
Are you having trouble checking if your blog posts are really SEO-optimized? Don’t worry! Use All In One SEO to check for you and give you feedback on exactly what you need to do to improve your rankings!
3. Define how many hours you will write per session
To save time writing your blog posts, you have to work in harmony with your psyche.
Your psyche suffers from anticipation and anxiety. When you don’t know how long you will be writing, your mind gets stressed and anxious.
How much longer am I going to sit here writing? Will I be able to finish this article? Am I writing quality content?
These thoughts run through your mind, motivated by mental fatigue and anxiety.
Do not be deceived. Insisting on continuing to write even when your mind is showing clear signs of exhaustion will not make you finish your article any faster.
When you review the text later, with a clearer mind, you realize that the blog post is poorly written, off-topic, and not worth posting on your website. Result? You will have to redo at least part of the text.
In other words, it turns out to be even more time-consuming.
So limiting the number of hours you write per session makes the process less tiresome. Even if it takes you several sessions to finish a single blog post, it will actually improve your writing skills as you will be writing at your best in every bit of the text.
Also, don’t underestimate the power of writing while thinking “I just need to focus for x hours, after that I’m free!”
To know how many hours you should write per session, you should look at how long you can write before mental exhaustion sets in. In addition, you must consider the available time you have to work on your blog.
4. Customizing your workspace can enhance your experience of writing a blog, making it more enjoyable
If you didn’t expect to see anything related to office decor on a list of time-saving blog writing tips, you’re underestimating the workspace’s power to affect your mind.
We can experience changes in our mood and have depressive episodes when the seasons change, especially when winter arrives and turns everything gray and white. Similarly, the colors, light, objects and smells inside our workspace affect our motivation and concentration to work.
What colors make you happy? Do you feel good when you light candles above your desk? Do you prefer to write in a more rustic and cozy room? Or maybe a clean and modern workspace? How about plants?
In addition, you can hang small pictures with motivational messages on the walls, decorate your desk with figures of inspirational characters, and buy a new journal!
Remarkably, a new journal to jot down your blog post schedule can make dramatically good changes in your mood!
5. If you live with other people, set strong boundaries about your blog writing routine
I’d say most writers prefer a quiet and interruption-free writing environment. I most certainly do.
Hence, it’s necessary to set clear boundaries with roommates or family members who share the same place as you.
Explain to them that noise, loud music, and constant interruptions to chit-chat interfere with your concentration and compromise the quality of your work as a blog writer.
Try to negotiate with them. Define the time of your writing sessions and explain that you need a calm and interruption-free environment during your writing time.
You could tell them they can go back to listening to music or talking after your writing is over.
6. Block all distractions from social media
A list of time-saving blog writing tips would never be complete without mentioning social media, the biggest time-waster.
Social media is programmed to keep you hooked, scrolling the endless feed and seeing ads. They know the best tactics to prevent you from closing your apps as they collect data on user behavior.
You may have already noticed that a quick, fast scrolling through the social media feed costs at least 30 minutes to 1 hour. However, you don’t have this time to waste when you should be working on becoming a better blog writer.
So no social media during blog writing. Sorry kids, I don’t make the rules.
Keep your smartphone off or in another room with notifications in silent mode during your writing hours. Also, don’t leave social media logged on your desktop. That will make the access more complicated and discouraging.
7. Turn off the bad noise and turn on the good noise
While you can’t control the noise coming from the streets or your neighbors’ apartments, you can control the sounds within your workspace.
Sometimes when you sit down to write, you decide to put on a song you love to lift your spirits. The only problem is that sometimes you forget you are going to write and get distracted by the music. Even start singing and all.
Maybe that gives you a good time – that’s great! But it won’t help your blog writing much, unfortunately. (I should know it, as I’m guilty of this crime…).
The best you can do is turn off the sound.
However, if you’re like me and can’t stand silence, it won’t be of much help either.
What works, alternatively, is finding some calming music that makes you feel good. Something that matches the vibe of the weather and, preferably, instrumental so that you don’t get distracted by the song lyrics.
I pretty often write while listening to Instrumental Jazz during spring-summer or Classical Music and Celtic Folk in autumn-winter. It rarely fails to make me concentrate and do my work!
Moreover, did you know that studies show that studying while listening to classical music helps you remember more information?
In fact, a study in a French university showed that when students listened to a lecture with classical music playing in the background, they remembered more information than a comparable group of students who took the lecture in silence.
How about giving Debussy and Grieg a try then?
8. Discover the most productive time for writing blog posts
Finding out the hours in which your blog writing is most productive is one of the best time-saving writing advice.
For example, I prefer to write in the morning, right after I wake up. I start writing around 6-7 am. My writing flows easier at this time. Also, the fact that both my apartment and the streets are still quiet at this hour makes the process more enjoyable for me.
However, another mental stimulus encourages me to write early: the fact that I have the rest of the day free from having to do the task that wears me out the most.
I’ve always preferred to do the most complicated task first, so I get rid of it faster.
Now, you have to test and practice blog writing at different moments of your day, according to your available time, to see which time is most productive for you.
It’s also worth mentioning that a writer’s most productive writing time can change with the seasons. So you have to get used to which time works best for you depending on the weather.
9. Get Grammarly to help with your blog writing
A good time-saving blog writing tips list could never fail to mention Grammarly.
Grammarly is a cloud-based typing assistant that uses artificial intelligence to identify writing errors and communication issues and to help improve the overall performance of your writing.
Pragmatically, Grammarly underlies all typos and issues with the engagement and delivery of your writing. You just need to click on the underlined words or sentences that Grammarly points out how to correct or write them more engagingly. In addition, Grammarly presents a grammatical explanation of why what you wrote was wrong, so you learn!
If you’re using a desktop, you don’t need to download any apps if you don’t want to. Just create a free account and use Grammarly to professionally proofread your blog posts and guarantee that they are understandable!
10. Don’t worry too much about performance, be more spontaneous
Sometimes you try to write a perfect piece of content. You keep rewriting the same sentence but fail to be satisfied and confident with your work.
Suddenly you realize that 30 minutes have passed but barely 30 words have been written. Anxiety hits, and you think you’ll never become a great blog writer.
The problem is that perfectionism and anxiety are holding you back. But you won’t improve your writing style that way.
To train in blog writing, you need to let go of the fear of underperforming and simply write. Blogging practice will come with time, as you keep doing it long enough.
You can read all the blog writing tips on the internet, but none of them will have any effect if you don’t actually write.
You have to grab your list of ideas to cover in your article and apply those ideas to your text. Just write. Forget about the performance! The important thing is to expose all those ideas in the text body.
The time to worry if your blog post is fluid, objective, and engaging enough is when editing.
During the editing process, you’ll identify what you could have done better and how you can do it next time. Your brain will store this information, but if it helps you, you can jot it down to use as a reference later when writing your next article.
Over time, you will naturally improve your blog writing.
However, the only way to practice writing blogs is through writing blogs.
11. Reward yourself after you’ve finished your blog writing session
Set a reward to encourage yourself every time you survive a blog writing session.
That reward can be anything you’d rather be doing instead of writing: watching the next chapter of a TV Show you love, turning on loud music, or going out for a walk. Anything.
But make your brain crave the reward.
You might think this piece of advice is unrelated to the other blog writing tips, but rewarding yourself is indeed beneficial for your mental health and makes you more productive:
Biologically, rewards increase dopamine levels in your brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps us feel happy, increases our memory retention, helps us sleep, and regulates our mood and appetite. A surge in dopamine reinforces specific behaviors as worthwhile.
Experiencing a rise in dopamine levels is addictive, and we physically and mentally crave that feeling again. When we’re content, we’re more productive.
Don’t worry, it’s not cheating. Educating your brain that hard work results in positive things is a motivating factor that boosts your productivity to get your tasks done faster, which results in more time saved.
12. Make copies of your writing progress
Never trust machines 100%. Ever.
Anything can happen. Your laptop might stop working, the word processor software you use might crash, or your internet connection might drop before Autosave has, well, autosaved the content you wrote.
Things like that happen, so you need to be one step ahead to protect your hard work. Always.
Make constant copies as you write more content in your article so you don’t waste your work and save time in case a tragedy happens.
You can make copies in another writing app, email your article to yourself, use a notepad, or whatever. But do make copies.
Blog writing tips like this are often underestimated, but they make all the difference in saving time.
13. Edit only after you have finished your blog writing
The human brain works best when it focuses on one activity at a time. That’s why you shouldn’t use your smartphone while driving. Likewise, while not as dangerous, you should focus on one blogging task at a time.
Write at writing time. Edit at editing time.
To say that doing both simultaneously would save you time would not be a smart, honest blog writing tip.
It may seem contradictory, but doing things separately actually makes the process faster, as it avoids the delays that only happen when you try to do everything simultaneously.
Also, trying to do two tasks at once compromises the quality of both.
For example, when you write and edit at the same time, your brain focuses on typical editing processes such as cutting and restructuring, which prevents your writing from flowing smoothly, disproportionately delaying the writing time of each paragraph.
On the other hand, when you edit before you have the text finalized, you miss errors that you only find when reading the entire finished article, as the final reader will read.
14. Learn to let go of unnecessary pieces of your blog articles
Learn from Elsa and let it go. You can’t hold it back anymore.
Okay, I know. You’re very proud of that 300-word block that, well… you have to discard. Right now. Because you know that that text block is going off on a tangent, adding pretty much nothing to the article topic.
A piece of content to be discarded may be the beginning of another article with another topic. But maybe it’s just a bunch of ramblings with no potential for conversion, which your blog has no room for.
I know how it is, sometimes we get carried away and end up talking too much. But when you become a good blog writer, you learn that only the blog posts that actually convert matter. And not our writer’s emotional attachment to what we write.
So let it go. Let it go! 🎵
15. Recycle your content
Many blog writing tips lists forget to mention how time-saving is to recycle content.
Those pieces of content you learned to let go of because they were vaguely off-topic in another blog post could become a new one.
So every time you discard content, don’t delete it forever. Copy the content you are removing during the editing process and paste it into a file for “Discarded Content”. Suddenly, when you’re starting a new article, you realize that you already have 400 words written on that topic!
Also, sometimes discarded content doesn’t work as a new blog post, but works perfectly as content for your mailing list, Category descriptions, or other blog areas.
So be mindful and recycle!
Bonus Time-Saving Blog Writing Tip: Never give writing a break
I originally intended to write only 15 blog writing tips, but adding this bonus writing tip for bloggers also matters.
Sometimes we get really exhausted from so much writing and decide to take a break. Sometimes an indefinite one. That’s anything but prudent. The more you write, the better and faster you will write.
If you feel like you’re about to burn out, try changing the writing type you do a little bit. Maybe writing in a journal about your hobbies or mental health could be good for you.
Of course, you’re not going to post those personal things on your blog, which doesn’t even have conversion potential. The intention is to keep training your brain in writing while taking a break from writing as a job.
The important thing is not to regress your progress towards becoming a better blogger. The more practice you acquire, the more time-saving your blog writing becomes.
Conclusion
Contrary to popular belief, bloggers’ lives have nothing to do with lazily holding a laptop on the beach and typing half a dozen words.
Managing to keep a productive routine while working from home and reconciling personal chores with all the tasks required to maintain a blog is not one of the easiest missions.
Also, if you aren’t already making a full-time income and have to make time to blog while working a 9-5 job, it’s even more complicated.
That’s why incorporating time-saving blog writing tips into your habits is so important to have a more productive and less exhausting blogging routine.
In addition, practicing blog writing and observing which working conditions boost your productivity are essential parts of making your writing more dynamic.
And don’t forget to try Grammarly for free to save time revising and editing your blog posts! Click here to create a free account today!
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Originally posted on May 1, 2022. Last updated on December 8, 2023.
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