People ask me regularly how I manage to publish 3 articles per week in 3 languages. A large part of this is due to my writing routine.
Here’s how I manage to get it done quickly
Limit your topics and make them categories of your blog
I don’t write about anything. My blog is on marketing and within this discipline I handle topics like market research, customer satisfaction, market research techniques, complaint handling and branding issues.
Next to the marketing stuffs I also deal with Big Data (which I consider a quantitative market research technique) and algorithm governance and ethics.
Finally I also write from time to time on entrepreneurship and academic research.
Adopt a reading routine
Scratching your head is unlikely to make you come up with writing ideas. You have to actively make ideas pop up in your mind. The only good way I found to make this happen is reading a lot.
Each and every day I read the same magazines and journals. And it starts right after I wake up : Les Echos, L’Echo, qz.com, retail design blog, Challenges.fr and La Tribune. I browse quickly through all of them and read only what catches my attention.
Once a week I invest time in reading academic papers from a selection of journals in my field : Journal of Marketing, Journal of consumer research, …
Podcast: a good way to speed up your routine
Since the end of 2019, I also broadcast weekly podcasts that I produce with entrepreneurs, marketing specialists, and so on … Beyond the SEO effect that these podcasts bring me (see the full article I wrote on this subject), it is also an excellent way to generate ideas. Indeed, a 20-minute conversation will allow you to rewrite content around your podcast and reuse it in different places to update your blog.
Ideas start popping up
I don’t need that many ideas per day to fill in my blog. Actually 1 idea per day is largely sufficient. But when it’s there I won’t let it go away. As part of my routine, I immediately write all ideas I have in Evernote (which I carry on all my devices). If I don’t write an article right away, I’ll just “store” the idea for later in a dedicated notepad of Evernote.
The writing exercise
I write my article in English first. It’s not my mother tongue but I feel comfortable writing in English. I first write the titles of the section of the article to help me structure my thinking. Then I fill the sections in. It usually doesn’t take more than 30 minutes to finish the article.
Translating the article
Then comes the almost final part : the translations.
I use google translate to get a first translated version of the article into French. I’ll then quickly go through and fix all automatic translation errors. It’s much quicker than translating from scratch and doesn’t take me more than 15 minutes to complete.
As far as the translation into Dutch is concerned, I let it do by a professional translator who uses the French version as a baseline.
Conclusion : write a blog like a Pro
If you want to leverage content marketing and improve your SEO, there aren’t many options. Writing quality content remains a MUST.
I’ve given you my recipe to sustain your blogging effort on the long term and as you can see from my very example, it very much pays off. After 9 years and more than 2600 articles written my website attracts thousands of visitors each month despite its niche positioning.
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