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summer writing: are there changes you could make to schedule or style?

  Creating Quality Content - designbyinsight.net

If content is king, then it follows that the more content you generate the bigger your crown, right? That has seemed the prevailing theory among the quote blog gurus.   Write well AND write often.  But generating excellent content is hard work and takes time, which is something many of us struggle to find day in and day out.   What if we take the opposite approach?  Write one one powerful piece of content each week  I loved this four-day writing plan on Copyblogger and the rationale behind it:

“Writing one epic post per week is a better long-term strategy than writing mediocre content every day.”

I’ve been looking at the summer calendar and realized there is no way to keep up my five-days-a-week posting schedule on my personal blog.  I will be writing more than once per week; but, I don’t expect to write more than twice most weeks.  Are you adjusting your writing schedule for summer?

Speaking of content, do you focus entirely on your opinion when sharing your blog posts?  Adding concrete data to your writing improves your credibility and helps to establish you as an authority.  Problogger has a great post with specific suggestions for utilizing data as well as choosing sources and citing references.   I’ve decided this is one of the areas I need to work on this summer.   Have you set any goals for improving the content on your blog through these summer months?

Let it be known that Tentblogger is one of my favorite writing resources.  He’s funny, generous, and he describes his wife like this:

an incredible woman who has helped clarify nearly every important decision that I’ve had since I’ve met her 

It’s not just that he  believes his wife is an asset to him, his business, and his life, it’s that he realizes he needs the input of others – their ideas, their suggestions, their criticisms.   We all need that, don’t we?  John (aka Tentblogger) recently attended a Seth Godin conference and shared with his readers some takeaways.  The one that most struck me was to execute.  Now.  Stop worrying about what I don’t have and where I want to be and begin working and doing with what I have and where I am.   I needed that.  It’s easy to get caught up in what’s not and lose sight of what is.      How do you seek the input of others when you are writing?

My mom is a horror-genre junkie.  She reads the books and watches the movies.  Her favorite?  Stephen King.  I’m not a horror-genre fan.  But there is one Stephen King book I have added to my “must read” list for the summer, On Writing.  After reading King’s 20 Tips for Becoming a Frighteningly Good Writer on Boost Blog Traffic, I’ve made a couple of big decisions:

  1. Limit my television viewing.  Because maybe television is the death of creativity.
  2. Read more, a lot more. King says, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

Will you be making any modifications to your writing schedule or techniques this summer?