Do you want to know how to write a website article in 3 hours? Yes, yes, it’s not fantastic! You don’t have to sit over one paragraph for half a day and spend sleepless nights editing a miserable thousand characters over the twentieth circle to get it perfect. You can do it ten times faster, without losing any text quality.
Believe me, you’re not the only one who suffers from excessive slowness. Many copywriters and journalists are very long to create materials. Well, when the fee allows you to savour every letter and every word of text – you can stretch the pleasure even to infinity. But when the payment is average and lower (a typical situation for beginners and underrated authors), you still have to accustom yourself to the rapid work. The principle “time is money” is the best way to describe freelancing. This, by the way, is where many talented authors stumble. The habit of tediousness leads to the fact that a person writes one article for a month, while his colleagues submit ten similar orders during the same time.
Writing speed is not a matter of temperament or any other innate traits. Rather, it’s a matter of discipline, planning, and following a plan. This is what we will do to develop these skills. Our task – to show how to allocate your time so that to meet the short deadline.
Who will be suitable for this tiphack:
- Beginning authors who are still on “you” with texts;
- experienced professionals who want to work faster and earn more;
- managers who supervise the work of copywriters.
Here we should make a small remark: our methods are not suitable for some formats. For example, it may take much more time to prepare deep analytics, longreads, articles on narrow subjects (metal products, jurisprudence) or a sales text. But you can write a strong informational article in 3 hours for sure. Let’s see how to do it.
How to write an article for the site in 3 hours
Choosing a topic
(15-20 minutes).
In case the topic of the article is determined by the customer or you have long ago made a content plan for the site and follow it, then move on to the next point. The rest read.
The theater begins with a hanger, and the text begins with the topic. If you want to make your own TK, but you have vague ideas about it, use the query statistics in Wordstat from Yandex. Suppose you have a site with a legal theme. Let’s take some common question, such as “execution of contracts,” and enter it into the text box.
The service will show us the different variations of the queries that users most often use when searching. Almost every one of these queries is a topic for a separate publication for the corporate blog.
Another way is the service Serpstat. We register on the service and go through the chain “Keyword phrase analysis” – “Content marketing” – “Search terms”. We enter our query and get a list of different variations of the query with prefixed question mark particles (what, where, why and others).
Make an article plan
(10 minutes)
Every piece should have a framework. All good authors determine in advance the structure of the article. You, too, should be guided by this rule – then each of your texts will turn out as it should be the first time.
A plan should not take a lot of time. The optimal length of the plan is 10 minutes. If it’s less – the article will come out unreasoned. If more – you risk to slip into disembodied reflections. Do the following:
1. state the purpose of the text in as simple language as possible. What do you want to tell the reader? What is he supposed to get out of it? The main idea is the thread on which everything else is strung. Form the material based on it, otherwise it will be a mess.
2. Make a list of subparagraphs. When you identify the purpose of the text, you’ll understand what you can do to achieve it, and you’ll have a much easier time.
3. Consider the length of the article. Professional authors believe that the number of characters is not important, and we fully agree with this. Nevertheless, specifying a size can sometimes be helpful. For example, if you have a habit of going overboard, you can set a clear limit in advance and write it at the top of the Wordboard page. This figure will be you invisibly control. In addition, if your goal – to get into the top search engines, you need to look at the volume of materials in competitors from the top 3 and write not less, but better than that.
If you know well the subject on which you are going to write an article, take up the keyboard immediately after drawing up a plan. If not, you will have to gather information. Many people take an infinite number of man-hours to research an issue beforehand, but we’re about to prove that it’s realistic to fit it into a small amount of time.
Finding materials for the text
(1 hour)
By no means do we suggest rewriting articles based on the first two results in Google. On the contrary, you absolutely must not do so! A limited amount of preparation time is on the contrary necessary to gather the best quality information without spraying nonsense from search engines.
Many authors make the standard mistakes. They:
- They look at knowingly unreliable sources;
- They find similar articles and reread the same thing several times;
- Study materials in their entirety, with a beginning, conclusions and lyrical digressions.
These mistakes are easy enough to avoid. The first thing to do is to take care to find authoritative publications on your topic. Alas, the Internet is replete with false information. If you are writing, say, a legal text about copyright, it is advisable to find out in advance from experts where to get the latest information. Second – abandon the misplaced scrupulousness. Of course, the habit of a careful reading of the material does you credit, but you run the risk of getting stuck on some trifle and lose a lot of time. You see a familiar fact – ruthlessly skip it. Notice that the author has deviated from the topic and philosophized – do not follow him.
When selecting information, you need to set clear goals. Anything that is not included in them, but you might be interested, you read later. For now, get yourself a Wordov file and copy there the pieces that you will need for work here and now. This is not something you can rewrite in your own words, but rather a reference book that you can refer to if you forget something important.
Once you’ve read all the information, put it through your head, and absorbed it firmly, it will be much easier to move on to the actual writing.
The foreign marketer Mark Levy has a wonderful book called “Genius on Demand. It describes the technique of freewriting, which is fast writing by instinct. In simple terms, freeraiting is when you study all the information on a topic, sit down at your laptop and pour out everything you’ve understood without stopping.
For those who are used to writing thoughtfully, this method will seem wild. However, it works. The fact that experience communicating with copywriters, as well as the experience of independent creation of articles shows that those who earn a living texts, there are two not just harmful, but directly so destructive habits that eat up a lot of time and prevent to reveal the creative potential. Here they are. If you find them in yourself – urgently re-educate, or big fees you will only dream.
Bad habit number 1. Overthinking while writing
You probably know how it is. At first you’re sitting, quietly writing, words flowing, and then you stop abruptly and start thinking about something. At first, these thoughts may be about the work – how to formulate a paragraph, how to better develop the topic, whether to add a new sub-item to the plan, etc. And then you catch yourself chewing on a fingernail, tapping a pen on the table, stroking a cat, or leafing through photos on your smartphone for 10 minutes. If there is not one but five or six such stops in a working day, it is already a lost hour.
Probably, such reflections arise from doubts about yourself and your knowledge. In that case, you need to understand one thing: if you have gathered reliable information on the topic, thought it through and made a clear plan of the text, everything you need is already in your head. All you have to do is pour it out on paper. Don’t let uncertainty stop you.
Bad habit number 2. Proofreading the text while you are writing
Some authors for some reason forbid themselves to make a mistake even in the draft. They will stare into each newly composed sentence, looking for spelling errors, tautology, and unfortunate turns of phrase. As a result, the work on each short text of 1500 characters drags on all day, and about the longridy and say nothing.
It is wrong to think that such perfectionism improves the quality of articles. In fact, it leads only to neurosis. Are you aware that top copywriters tend not to correct mistakes before proofreading? Every blog you read says in one voice that they make the dirtiest drafts possible. Then all this dirt is cleaned up and a diamond is produced. Take your cue from the maestros. You’re going to revise the text at the end anyway, and you’ll still find dozens of missteps in it. So why worry about them in advance? Sit down at the monitor and write tirelessly until the article is ready. Even if you start every sentence with the word “however” and in every paragraph ten times the word “may” occur – fine. All this is very quickly removed at the stage of editing. But you will have an hour later, albeit raw, but the finished text, rather than a blank sheet with two perfect sentences at the top.
Once you get rid of these habits, you’ll notice that your business will be more fun.
What about SEO for the article?
Many of those who write SEO and LSI texts try to put in keywords as soon as they are drafted. This is not the way to do it. Keywords and phrases are best inserted at the very end. When you begin to reread the text, you will quickly come up with an idea of where this or that search query should be, and how to rephrase a sentence to harmoniously weave it into the overall canvas.
Checking uniqueness and proofreading errors
So, three hours have passed, our text is ready. Now it’s time to put it aside and do something else. A little later, after a break from it, you will return and with a fresh head start editing.
We intentionally did not allocate a deadline for proofreading, because this is the most unpredictable stage. A professional writer who loves literature, writes a thousand words a day, and knows his or her subject matter thoroughly can produce an article close to perfection on the spot. His less experienced colleague will probably make many more mistakes. Maybe at first, you will have to remove hundreds of typos, dozens of repetitions of words, and spend two hours on the edits (you can use programs to check spelling). That’s okay. Over time, you’ll write better and better. But even if you belong to the first type of writer, you must check the text. A small error can spoil the whole picture.
Also, most customers require text uniqueness of at least 100%, so anti-plagiarism to use, too. Even one common phrase, which is often used in other texts can lower the uniqueness to 94% instead of the desired 95. Here are the best services to check the uniqueness of the text.
Conclusion
Chances are there will be some conservatives who do not agree with our approach or those who have entered the query “how to write a website article” and expected to see something else. For some reason, it is considered that a real writer should work long and painfully, otherwise his work will be hackwork. However, our article is not a manifesto of slovenliness and carelessness, but an attempt to help people optimize their work. A good text is not necessarily a text born in the throes of ten days. On the contrary, the material written with a light heart is much better perceived by both the customer and the reader.
Try at least once to put what you have described into practice. Set yourself a specified time frame and stick to it. You’ll see how much easier it is for you, without sacrificing quality. Then you may want to make the tips from our article part of your everyday life.