How to Write a Year's Worth of Quality Blog Posts in Minutes

photo by bfishadow

Many of the coaches I know and work with tell me that it takes them forever to write a blog post.

I have to admit, even though I’m a writer, sometimes that happens to me too. Even worse, I have a bad habit of editing as I write, which often prevents me from creating more content.

I picked up a golden piece of advice recently while I was attending Milana Leshinky and Rich German’s JVX Live event, which featured guest-speakers Lisa Sasevich,  Loral Langmeier and Sean Roach to name a few. More than once, these heavy-hitters offered this advice about writing.

Don’t.

What?

Don’t write your content.

So if you’re not writing this stuff, what do you do?

Dictate and transcribe.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard this advice, but as someone who enjoys writing, I’ve struggled to wrap my head around this idea. When I write it’s like a direct channel from wherever the words are coming from through my hands to the screen. The idea of dictating those ideas just seems like it would be too far of a stretch for me.

But after hearing this advice for the hundredth time, I tried it and dictated my first blog post (this one) in about 2.5 minutes.

Woah! That’s right . . . I said 2.5 minutes.

While it didn’t come out as perfectly as I would have liked it if I had written it, it’s done and I can move on to the next blog post.

Here’s how you can do this too:

1. Brainstorm & dictate your topics. Instead of spending hours writing one post at a time (like I’ve done until now), spend those hours brainstorming a week, month or year’s worth of topics. What do you want to promote and launch in the next year? What are the questions that people are always asking you? What are the questions that people should ask you? Come up with a list of 52 topics, a topic for every week, or some other number of topics. Then grab your smart phone and hit record. Talk like your talking to a friend. We often talk differently than the way we write, however, conversational writing speaks to the heart of your audience. You’ll be able to talk out several posts in under an hour!
2. Hire someone to transcribe your recording. Even if you’re just starting out, hire someone to do this for you. It’s completely worth the small investment because you will be freeing up hours to do things that generate money for you quicker than your blog will. You’ll have more time to network, speak at events, have sales calls and speak with potential referral partners. I have small kids at home and I work around their schedule, so saving time really was the carrot that got me to try this approach. I have three days a week to make money and I know those hours are better spent talking to people than sitting behind my computer. It’s so much faster to dictate your content and edit your transcript than it is to write from scratch. In fact, I just completed three posts today from start to finish in under 1.5 hours.
3. Schedule your posts. Who says you have to write and publish your topics in order? If you’re suddenly inspired by a topic slated for June and it’s only January, so what? Record and transcribe it when you’re inspired, then save it as a draft and schedule it for June. Set it and forget it. Also, when you’ve got a few posts lined up as drafts you put yourself ahead of the game. Instead of sitting down on Sunday night to publish something on Tuesday, you can have your assistant log in to your blog and schedule the posts while you’re catching up on The Walking Dead (ok, that’s how I like to spend my Sunday nights).
4. Advanced tip: Use video instead of audio. Video is Internet gold when it comes to traffic and connecting with your audience online. When you get used to talking into your phone, it’s not a huge step to get used to talking into your computer, iPad or GoPro. And you can even get portions of that transcribed too so that you’ve got the words that will set up the video in your blog post.

What will you dictate and get transcribed this week? Share your ideas in the comments below.