Since I started my 30 days of Blogging Challenge, I have found that I really can’t write a brand new post on a daily basis.

I’m writing them at 11pm at night because I got distracted with the day to day of running my business, plus I have the kids at home at the moment because of the recent pandemic, but I don’t want to fail within the first week!

Time is my enemy here – not inspiration, so I’ve decided to deploy an old hack to try and batch write as many blog posts at once as I can and I’m going to show you in this post how I do it.

I’m using WordPress here but the principle applies to any platform that lets you add a blog by the way.

Step 1 – Create the blog post titles

You need your ideas before you can start writing.

I head straight to the ‘Posts’ section and write out the titles of the posts long before I ever write the content. I get inspiration for my post titles from conversations I have with my client and with my paid Membership Group and usually note them down or just add the titles to WordPress without writing the posts.

Quite often they ask the same questions, but perhaps I could put the answer into a post that I could direct them to. Also if they have these questions, then there may others who have them who I’m not working with right now and they could find the answer via my blog.

If I’m trying to think of ideas on the spot them I look to the conversations that I’ve had in my Facebook Groups and over email with clients the past week and see what content I could create as it’s more fresh in my mind (hence the subject of this post!)

Creating these 5 titles (no content) took me 20 minutes.

Step 2 – Add the first paragraph

Much in the same way as when a writer sends a pitch to a magazine and only write the outline, I do this with my blog posts.

I open up each of the posts in it’s own tab and then add the first paragraph so that I can set the tone about what the piece will be about.

Getting that first paragraph right is what helps the rest of the content to flow.

You write the introduction, a brief summary and then explain why the reader should continue to read.

As I was writing, I pulled up a few blog posts on the subject I found by Googling to make sure that I wasn’t repeating the same old rhetoric on the subject and I could add my own flavour.

It’s a total of 138 words and it took me 10 minutes to write (with headphones on and no distractions!)

Step 3 – Map out the sub headings

Sub headings are a way to give your blog post some structure.

The reader’s eye will scan down the page very quickly and if the key words related to your post can stick out in those headings, it will give them an understanding of what’s the come and ensure they stay and read!

There should be around 3-4 headings ideally and writing these out will enable you to structure the content without writing the post as you go.

I’ve mapped mine out in the post below in a way that I often use for writing blog posts:

• I answer the question straight away
• I then give some background on why that’s the answer, with examples
• I then talk about why it’s important to the reader and make it about them

See the headlines I’ve created below to see this in action:

You can apply this structure to almost any post.

You could be writing about an experience from your past for example and break it up into chunks that outline the why you’re talking about it, how it helps the reader and then actions that the reader can take away after reading the post.

It took me around 5 minutes to map out the sub titles for this post.

Step 4 – Fill in the gaps

Then comes the “hard” part – you have to sit down and write.

Hopefully it should be a little easier than just sitting down to a blank page and writing because you have the subject, the outline and the structure already in place. In theory you are just rocking up and wriitng.

I find the “rocking up” bit hard to do.

I need to have quiet and space so have found that writing in my office with headphones on early in the morning before the kids wake up is the only way to do this. You’ll have your own way.

As I write this I am having a rare child-free morning so I have the ability to batch-write 5 posts in a row.

To do this effectively I’m pressuring myself to write a post in 25 minutes without worrying about grammar or spelling mistakes.

I do this by using the Pomodoro technique and having this timer in the top of my browser running: https://tomato-timer.com/

The technique asks that you focus hard for 25 minutes and then have a screen-free break of 5 and then back for 25 minutes and then another break.

The idea is that you use those 5 minutes for your toilet break, checking your phone, make a coffee and for the 25 minutes of focus you only write.

It works!

I have managed to create courses, videos, long essays and sets of blog posts in the past doing it this way.

Have music on, or not but focus for those 25 minutes. It’s short enough even for the most undisciplined person to try.

The Results

Including this blog post, I was able to write 5 posts today in a total of 4 hours.

Here’s how the time broke down:

20 minutes – all titles written
45 minutes – all summaries written
15 minutes – all sub heading written
2.5 hours – all posts written (including breaks)

TOTAL TIME = 3hrs 50 minutes

I know that time might seem like a lot for 5 posts but it used to take me that long to create one post in the past.

This means I have the next 5 days of blog posts written, which on a weekly basis is quite a bit of time, however I usually prefer to post once a week, so in theory this could have been a month’s worth of posts.

I could have been quicker had I not kept getting distracted when I was Googling my research and it helps that I chose not to add images for the time being as that could have added another 30 minutes to the time per blog. I always feel like I have to find the perfect pic to work.

Let me know in the comments if you have ever tried batch writing and the things that you do to help you get your writing done and dusted!