All Entries Tagged With: "research"

How Long Does It Take To Write An Article?

Isn’t it time consuming to write an article? That’s a question we get a lot. How much time should it take? Really?

There’s no easy answer because everyone is different, but it shouldn’t really take long. If you know your niche well you should be able to write at least a handful of articles off the top of your head. If you sit down and make a list of topics that you could easily write about off the top of your head, with no research, you’ll probably come up with at least 25 topics. If you are a true expert in your niche you can probably rattle off 100 or more.

Those should be the first articles you write. 500-600 word articles. You can knock that out in 10 minutes if you are an expert in your niche and don’t need research.

But what if you do need to research a topic? How long should it take then? Not much longer really. Here’s what you do:

1. Research first – Write your article topics out in a list as before and group them according to like-topics. Then research those topics that fall into the same general category at one time.
2. Write all like-topic articles at one time – If you do all your research at one time and write the articles immediately after, you’ll likely find that you can write your articles in the same amount of time that you take to write them off the top of your head. The only difference is you just spent about 30 minutes extra to research them before writing them. If you can write 10 articles in one sitting then you’ll be done only slightly longer than it takes to write off the top of your head.

If you write articles like this then it shouldn’t take you long at all and the return on your investment can be huge.

How Long Should You Spend On Research?

Ideally, you would know everything there is to know about your niche and not have to do any research when writing your articles. But that isn’t realistic. No one can know everything.

At some point you will have to do some research. How much time should you spend on it? Well, you should obviously spend as much time as is necessary to gather the information you need for your articles, but you also have to keep in mind the gold axiom: Time is money.

Over the years I’ve discovered that it’s best to do all the research I need for a particular topic in one sitting so that I don’t have to jump back and forth between projects as that alone can be a time killer. By managing your projects in time blocks you can get more done. Do all of your research at once and take good notes then write all of your articles at the same time. This way you can do all of your research for all of your articles on a particular topic and save yourself some time. With the proper approach you can research 20 or 30 articles in an hour or two of time and then be able to write 10 articles per hour if you are fast at collecting and organizing your thoughts. Your article marketing time will be spent doing the important things and not wasting time.

How To Write 10 Articles In One Hour

“Traditional” writers don’t understand. They ask me, “How do you write that fast? Your articles can’t be that good.” The fact is, I write better articles than most writers who only write one article per hour and charge $50 for it. Here’s how I do it.

1. I’ve got my list of keywords already planned
2. I write all 10 articles on the same topic using related keywords for each article
3. I do all of my research for all 10 articles at the same time
4. I focus all of my writing energy at one time on those 10 articles

It’s a very simple recipe. I focus all of my energy on one task at a time. First comes the keyword research. Without keywords, it doesn’t matter how many articles you can write. You’ve got to choose your keywords and make sure they are relevant to your topic. After doing my keyword research, I pick the best keywords for my topic and decide which articles I’ll write with those keywords in mind. Then I do my research, targeting the research around the keywords that I’ve chosen.

I can do research for 10 articles in about 30 minutes using this formula. Much of the research that I’ll perform in any given area will be relevant to a handful of articles. Sometimes I can use the same information in several articles as long as I write about it differently enough and use different keywords so that the information and sources do not appear too similar. It’s easy if you know how.

After the research phase, I start writing. I can write a 500-700 word article in six minutes using keywords as anchors. I know beforehand how many keywords I need for each article. I just make sure that I sprinkle the keyword throughout the article without overdoing it and write a decent article about the topic. I can do that 10 times in one hour, and I’m betting my left arm you can too.