If you’re looking to write more articles for your own use, or you write for other people and want to increase your hourly rate for content writing the one thing you can do is to write the same articles but to write each one in less time. This can be quite challenging but there are three simple ways you can approach this.
First of all, if you ordinarily touch type then this can take minutes off writing every single article. Secondly, if you’re good at speaking or if you’re happy using dictation software this can be the way to go. And finally if you can reduce the amount of time you need to research an article then this will also decrease the amount of time it takes to get that article written. And all these things put together will help you to write faster.
If you don’t already touch type then you really need to learn. Touch typing is a good skill which can be used through out your life not just in your content writing. There are many good books on touch typing but a good way to go is to find software which trains you to touch type. Failing that, look at your local community college or your local adult education facility and there are bound to be courses on touch typing available. Just by doubling your touch typing speed or adding those skill even half of them you should be able to double the output of articles. Touch typing is a skill you really want to have.
The second thing you can do is use dictation software. There are lots of different pieces of software out there and these can be vital to getting your articles and content put together faster. After all, you may only be able to type at thirty words per minute but there’s no reason why you can’t dictate something at a hundred words per minute. That’s over three times faster than you were doing previously – a massive productive improvement. Now there’s a small learning curve to most software of this type. You do need to make occasional corrections and you will need to have access to a quiet environment to work in with no distractions. If you start trying to speak out your writing in a crowded office some people will look at you very strangely when you start reading out your articles and saying them aloud. But if you have the facilities to speak in relative privacy and you spent a bit of time training the software the dictation can be an excellent way to get your articles put together in only a few minutes of time.
The final thing you should do is try very much to do is to reduce your research time. One way to do this is to come up with a set of bookmarks of sites you commonly use for research. When you’re only trying to get a 500 word article produced then you don’t need to do a great amount of research for any particular topic. All you need to do is to find some suitable content from multiple sources and use that to shape your original article (don’t copy from the sources). Scan read through those sources and sit down and write everything without the aid of your notes to go with it. And one way to reduce the research time I highly recommend is to know the good sources in advance. If you have a set of common sources which are useful to you that can be much better than hunting away through Google. And there are decent sources on there. You can use Wikipedia so long as you can verify the quality of the information provided by the different sources or you may use other blogs within your field to provide standard background to go with the well-researched information commonly found on Wikipedia. There’s no reason to spend a lot of time doing research and you’ve shaved a couple of minutes off your research time for every article you write and that’s a big saving over the course of a day or week.
If you put all of these three techniques together then you’ll write faster. First of all you need to make a choice. Will you touch type or will you use dictation software? Either one of these are much faster than the sort of hunt and peck typing that so many of us do with a keyboard. And along side that you need to be taking every advantage to cutting down your research time that you can. When you put all of these advantages in place you’ll be able to increase your throughput for writing articles and, if you get paid to write, you’ll increase the amount of money you make from your writing work.