Do you often find yourself struggling to remember your ideas for posts? Well, this is why you should pre-write your articles. Article pre-writing is a simple task, yet it can greatly lower your stress level and it allows you to create much more valuable posts.
What is it
Article pre-writing is exactly what it sounds like - you write your articles before you post them. Pretty much all blogging platforms including a “save as draft” functionality, and that is all pre-written articles are. They are just quick drafts of a future post.
At any given moment this blog has at least 10 articles freshly written and ready to post. This is how I have been able to post 2 to 4 articles per day.
Why do it?
As I said above, when you pre-write all of your articles you can greatly lower your stress levels. With pre-written posts you don’t have to worry about deadlines, quality, topics, etc, because all of your posts are already 90% written.
One thing I have found helpful is to write down any ideas I get during the day, then at night I write up some posts about those ideas. This way my blogs always have fairly fresh content and they can be updated regularly. The whole point is to make your blogging schedule fit in with your current schedule, not the other way around.
Do they have to be full articles?
Whenever I pre-write an article I tend to first write a really rough draft, then a few minutes later (after playing a quick game or something) I go back and fix up any spelling and grammatical errors. So the answer is yes, you should try to make your pre-written articles as full as possible. Just pretend you are going to post the article now, instead of later.
The number one thing to remember is don’t slack off. Don’t come up with some partial post then not finish it because “I can do it later.” You should try and finish it now so you can have free time later.
When is it not applicable?
I would have to say news articles should never be pre-written. This is only because nobody wants to hear about yesterday’s news 3 days later.
Does it really help that much?
Pre-writing all of your articles really helps. I can generally go in 30 minute to 1 hour spurts where I can write 3 to 7 articles. I could never do that if I was always trying to “beat the clock.” And the truly amazing thing is I have much less stress in my life because my blogging schedule fits into my free time. I am not constantly trying to figure out when I can write a post, because it is already written.
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