How to Get Your Blogs and Writing Done

I’m a follower of Tim Grahl who writes a great blog at Out:think. His byline is “Results driven marketing for authors.” More simply, he’s out to help you sell more books!

Recently he wrote a blog titled: 3 Steps to Get Your Writing Done. I’m going to share his three steps and add one more that works for me. Tim’s three steps to get your writing done are as follows:

1 Do it in the morning

Simply put, do it before you do anything else. For example, before the kids get out of bed, before email, before any meetings… Then it’s done and you’re free to live a normal life for the rest of the day. Mostly this works for me.

2 Put it on your calendar

When you schedule things it gives it existence. And, when our thoughts have existence it’s easier to remember them and get them done. For the left-brain logical people this is a no-brainer. I’m a right brain person. This is less effective for me. And, it still works to block out time and remind myself to get my blog writing done.

3 Never start without knowing what you are going to write

I have a confession to make about this… Most of the time I don’t know what I’m going to write about… For instance, today… No clues… So, I have a few old fallback, super reliable, trusty sources of new blogs. And, today I’m using one of them…

• Comment on the blogs that you are reading. You are reading other blogs aren’t you?
• Similarly, comment on a newspaper or magazine article you’re reading.
• Or, something that happened recently with a client or colleague.

And, by comment I mean express an opinion or add something to what is already being said. In this post, I’ve grabbed Tim’s three points and added one more…

4 Do it because you said you would

This is my fail-safe. This is the rule you don’t break simply because you said you wouldn’t. This is when your commitment kicks in. This is me writing this right now. It’s 9:45pm on a Saturday night and I haven’t done my daily blog yet. Yes, clearly I have no social life. And, I have a choice… I’ve now written and published a blog every day for 122 days straight. I haven’t missed a day and that includes travelling in Asia for 49 of these 122 days. So, why I am writing a blog post today? Because I said I would. The bigger picture is it helps me write my books. The daily picture is it keeps me on track. I know from my Google Analytics stats that Saturday has the lowest readership of any day of the week. If I was going to skip a day, then today is it. No. Not on. Not acceptable. I’m posting every day and today is another day to post.

Image from Drew Coffman via Out:Think post above

How do you get your blog writing done? Share your thoughts below.