AP 0335: How Many Words Should a Blogger Write Every Day?

AskPat 335 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 335 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hope you're having an amazing week so far, whenever you're listening to this.

Alright, here's today's questions from David.

David: Hello. My name is David Moriarty. My question is, as a new blogger, how many words should I write per day?

Pat Flynn: David, what's up? Thank you so much for the question today, and welcome to the blogging world. I really appreciate you coming into the show and listening and asking a question. And this is great, especially for those of us who've actually been doing this for a while because sometimes I feel like, even for myself, when you have been blogging for a while, you kinda think you've got it. And then you walk walk away from writing for a little bit, and then it might be a struggle to come back into it. Or maybe you're a blogger who's experienced, and you want to start writing books. Well, it's a completely different mindset and ballgame, and you're gonna need to sorta ramp up your writing as well.

And when it comes to blogging, if you are a newbie, you should absolutely be writing every day. Now don't confuse that for having to publish every day. But the practice of writing every day it's gonna really help you hone in on your skills. Just make it really easy for you to get what's in your brain onto your screen or into that particular post that you're writing. And it's just gonna make life so much easier. Plus, it's just great to write and think and . . . You know when you're writing these words every day, and I'm gonna go over some tools to help you and how much you should be writing every day, it just helps you expand those ideas that you have. It helps you dig deeper into what you're thinking about writing or doing. It could really help you just improve in all other aspects of your life.

I know, for instance, I've been writing in a journal daily with my hands. Who does that now? No, I use my hands. I use handwriting in this journal called The Five Minute Journal at FiveMinuteJournal.com, all spelled out. And I do that every single morning. And it's been great, and it's great to reflect and be grateful for things that are happening in my life and also share with this journal, which is essentially sharing with myself, what do I want to accomplish during the day. And by the end of the day, I talk about what I did accomplish and what I could do to improve. It's helped me tremendously. Now you don't necessarily have to write it with your hand, but there is an app available for The Five Minute Journal as well that you can download and accomplish the same things when you wake up in the morning and before you go to bed.

Now whether you use that or not for journalling, writing everyday is a great exercise. It's, like I said, gonna help you become a better writer, and there's a couple of resources I want to share with you for writing daily. First one is if you go to 750words.com. Seven-fifty, in the numbers, words, spelled out, dot com. 750words.com. It's a site where a number of other writers have committed to learning a new habit to write every day. And I'm on the site right now. The time that I'm recording this, it says, “Join 259,534 other writers by signing up now.” And it's a completely free service and allows you to just write every day. It's all online and it's private too. It's not a blogging . . . or it's not updating your status for everything. It's about three pages worth, 750 words. And the thing is it's fun. And it helps you level up your writing and not just your writing and creating content every day but also the number of words per minute. It helps you keep track of that as well. Again, it just helps you expand your mind, and then when you go in to write your blog post it just becomes much, much easier. So you include some of what you're writing for your blog post in your daily writing. Or maybe the days that you don't write in this tool 750words.com, you're actually publishing something on your site. Or you can take what you write here and it might become useful for your site where you can expand on it on your blog as well.

But I love this idea of writing everyday and I write everyday in my journal. I typically write everyday in some way, shape, or form. Whether I'm writing scripts for videos, or outlines for podcasts, or blog posts. So that's the first resource I have for you. Another one is I recommend going to Google and looking up “my 500 words“. So 500 words instead. And this will take you to a site by Jeff Goins, who's a good friend of mine over at goinswriter.com. G-O-I-N-S writer dot com. And this is a particular challenge that he posted a while back. And it's really cool because a lot of people are getting on to this challenge. It's a 31-day challenge. I don't know if it's necessarily going right now, but I think it could just be ongoing if you come across this particular page. And you can sign up to his lists, and it gives you writing prompts and free updates and things like that which is really cool. So it challenges you to write 500 words per day for 31 days. And you can write more.

What I love about this is you don't edit. He's actually suggesting don't edit. Just write. And that's cool because that is really how writing should be. You shouldn't write and edit at the same time. That's something I learned when I started to write books, and now that I just write stream of consciousness, I don't edit. I edit at the end, or I save all the editing for the end after the whole manuscript is done. It's just become so much better and a lot better stories, a lot better ideas come out of my brain and onto the screen when I'm in creative writing mode as opposed to try to write and then edit, and then I just don't get deep into something. So, I know some people who actually take the delete key off of their keyboards as well to force them not to hit that delete key which is pretty interesting. So those were the couple of resources I wanted to share with you. Again, 750words.com, and also look up “my 500 words” in google. That will take you to Jeff's site at goinswriter.com.

Now when it comes to the frequency that you publish blog posts on your site, there is no right answer. The only right answer is that you should be consistent, or as consistent as possible. And that's not always possible. But when you get off that rail, you just get back on and keep going again. And once you pick a frequency, you can change, but you don't want to change too often. You want to change for the purpose of finding your rhythm and finding your audience's rhythm that they are in tune to what you have to share. And once you find that, then you want to stick with it as best as possible. And again, you can change things. You can tweak and experiment, but you always want to make sure that are trying to be as consistent as possible.

Well, what does that mean? Does that mean, everyday? Maybe. There's a lot of sites out there that have posts that come out everyday. Sometimes multiple times per day. Problogger.net, DailyBlogTips.com, and a few other ones come to mind. There are other ones that post blog posts weekly, like my own site. There are other that don't post even that often, like SocialTriggers.com with Derek Halpern. But whatever the case may be, try and be consistent. But you just have to pick one that works for you. A frequency that works for you. And the cool thing about Derek's is he doesn't write very often. And in the first few years of his blog, he actually wrote one or two posts a month. But he spent a lot of time creating those posts, working on the research and figuring out how to create something completely unique and different out there so that it would really take off and go viral once those things came out. And he did a lot of work on the marketing aspect of blog posts.

A lot of people spend too much time creating content everyday. Everyday, content, content, content and not enough time on the marketing aspect of it. But he built a lot of great relationships. He picked a lot of the right topics and presented them in a way that people wanted to share them. Some of those posts even sometimes creating controversy which got even more people into what he was writing about, which is a strategy that a lot of people have used as well. Going against the grain or talking about something different than most people do, then linking to those other people. They link back, and a lot of people will converse and talk about it. They leave comments and so on and so forth.

So, for myself, I do it weekly. When I first started out, it was three days a week. And then I added the blog, or the, excuse me, the podcast. And then the videos, and now I do a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. The blog post, podcast, and video respectively. So, again, it's totally up to you, but you don't have to publish everyday. Just make sure that what you publish is great and unique, and you spend some time marketing it. That doesn't just mean posting it on Twitter. It means putting it in the right places. Talking about it. Emailing people. People who are on your email list. People who you think would find it valuable. And that's just scratching the surface of what you can do to market it.

But again, David, in terms of frequency, it's again totally up to you, but make sure you make good use of that time that you do writing. And write everyday so at least you can create that habit. A lot of things have changed since . . . I know a lot of people who have gone through similar challenges. Leslie Samuel from BecomeABlogger.com, who's in a mastermind group with me, and he's been seeing amazing things coming from it as well. Again with those resources for you one more time: 750words.com. Goinswriter.com/my500words.

And, yeah, thank you so much David. I really appreciate the question. I wish you and everyone else out there writing blog posts the best of luck. David, for having your question featured here on the show, you're gonna get an AskPat t-shirt headed your way. You'll hear from my assistant very soon to collect your information for that.

Thanks again, everybody, for listening in. I hope you have an amazing week, and to finish off this episode, I'm wanna go with a quote from Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber. He says “Fear is the disease. Hustle is the antidote.”

Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you the next episode of AskPat.