My Writing Process
I recently took on a challenge to write a blog post for every day of the week for 30 straight week days. At the beginning of this year I had a goal to write more. I started off writing a couple of posts per week, but eventually faded to 1 per month. I probably don't have 30 blog posts for the whole year, so how will I ever do 30 straight?
Well, so far I haven't found it too terribly difficult. For this post, I wanted to briefly explain how I get from idea to published.
Capturing Ideas
Once you know that you have to write that day and you know you need an idea, they seem to start rolling in left and right. What experience do you want to share, what did you find interesting, helpful, what problem did you face, etc. The key is capturing all of these ideas and thoughts as they arise. I mostly use Evernote to capture these things. I create a tag called "blog idea" and tag each note with it. Evernote is good for this because, you can pretty much capture anything: urls, emails, photos, pdf's, voice memos, and just regular notes. Then once you capture this media, be sure to jot down exactly what you're thinking about when you have the idea. I've created plenty of notes that I opened later and wouldn't have a clue what I was thinking when I wrote it. Sometimes, if I'm at my computer, I go ahead and start the post, or at least jot down the outline for it. Voice memos are great for when you cannot write -- driving down the road, exercising, etc.
Writing
I typically take a coffee break at 3.00PM or so each day and while I'm sipping on my coffee, I do the Pomodor Technique (spend 25 minutes of extreme focus) to write out a blog post. I usually don't worry too much about details (spelling, grammar, etc) I just want to get the rough draft written.
Review & Publishing
Either later that evening or first thing in the morning I'll review the post. It's amazing how letting a little time go by and letting the words sit will bring clarity to the article. I'll usually spend 10-25 more minutes rearranging and getting it ready to publish.
Promoting
Once I publish the article, I'll share it through Buffer so it'll post to all my social accounts. Then I'll try to think of a person, group, or organization that might benefit from my writing. For example, if it's a Ruby topic, I'll send it to Ruby Weekly or just recently my accounting article was shared as a guest post on the LessAccounting blog. This has been a great way for me to gain so readers and help folks at the same time.
I hope that helps! Happy Writing!