If you are thinking of starting your own blog, you might be under the impression that it is an easy task. I’m not saying that it is difficult – anything can be done, but you might be thinking (like me in the beginning) that it is so easy and you can earn money relatively quickly with not too much monetary and time investment. Well, at least I was under this impression. While the monetary part is totally true, the time involved in the process – not so much…
I purchased an Income School course, where the owners recommended writing 30 articles as quickly as possible. And that should be a start. Well, you might be thinking that 30 articles at 500 words should not be that big of a deal. The trick is that you are required to write 10 articles of 1,200 words, 10 articles of 2,500 words and 10 articles of 3,500 words. Total, this adds up to 72,000 words…
Maybe you have watched the Income School video where they show that writing a short 1,200 words can take under an hour, then you calculate the time required to finish the entire blog, and you might be under the impression that you need total of approximately 60 hours. Maybe you are a genius and you can do it. Well, apparently, I am not. In this article, I will disclose the realistic time required to write and publish a blog post (based on my experience). In my opinion, the Income School people are painting the process in rose colors a little bit. I agree that you need to be positive, but this is kind of too much of a rose tone.
So let’s not prolong this intro and let’s get to the first stage of writing a post:
Planing A Blog Post (10-20 min.)
This is when you research the blog post, make some notes and plan the general structure of the post. Usually, I break this up into 200–300 word paragraphs to make the entire process easy. I found that breaking down the post that way makes it a lot more manageable and easier to write.
Writing A Blog Post Of 1,200 Words (1 hr. - 2 hrs.)
Based on my experience, if I am familiar with a topic, I usually spend about 1–2 hours writing a post. Your time might be different, based on your skills, but I compared the time with a professional writer and our time frame for writing a post is very similar. I also try as much as I can to be close to the truth presented in my articles as I am not trying to fool a reader with some bogus text which will turn him away so he won’t return to my website ever again. I won’t be trusted anymore if I don’t do it the right way. That is why The New York Times has so many readers around the world (not only in New York) – because they built trust over the years.
Tweaking Your Post (1/2 hours)
In this phase, I read the post, making any final changes to the writing. Finding different wording, changing phrasing, finding confusing sentences and restructuring them.
Adding Main Post Picture (15-20 min.)
It’s time now to add a nice, relevant picture to your post. Of course, you could be lucky and find the best ever photo for your blog in the first two minutes. But you need to resize it for the web. You cannot post a 300 DPI picture to your post because it is too large, which will affect your website download speed. I keep my pictures at 72 DPI, which is sufficient for the web. Sometimes I combine two or more pictures to better match the content of a post.
Coping Your Post Into WordPress (10 min.)
This part is where I log into WordPress, copy everything to WordPress, make headings, etc. The easy part, but I have the structure of the post designed previously. If this is your first post ever, than you need a significant amount of time to think everything through and plan it.
Adding Piterest Graphic Pin (15 min.)
At the beginning of the post, I add a Pinterest pin graphic, which after publishing a post, I link to my article in Pinterest. Creating a Pinterest pin to match a Pinterest specification is a pretty straightforward and easy task since I am using Canva.com to do so. Canva is free to use and very easy.
Adding Additional Pictures (15 min.)
To break up large chunks of text, I usually add some in-article pictures. It is boring to read large amounts of text, so I believe pictures make an article more interesting to read. All the magazines and big commercial websites do the same thing so there must be a pretty good reason behind it.
Adding In Article Links (10 min.)
When I am almost done, I read through the article, looking for places where the content is similar to articles I’ve already written and I insert a link to them.
Adding Links To Related Articles (10 min.)
At the end of the article, I make a section called ‘Related Articles” where I post links to the articles related to this article or to articles I believe might interest a reader. The reason? So the reader stays on my site and reads through as many of the articles as possible.
Adding Links To The Money Making Pages (5 min.)
After the section with “Related articles.” I add a section to Money-Making Pages, hoping that the products might interest a reader. Advertising products sold on Amazon is the easiest thing to do – commission is somewhere around 4 or 5 percent, which is OK. It will not make me a Rockefeller, but who knows?
Adding Your Post To Google Search Console
Google technology is great and works fine, but it is not perfect. I’ve heard of people not being indexed by Google for months. So to avoid this situation, I usually log in to my Google Search Console and I do add a freshly published page. That way, I can be sure that none of my pages are omitted by Google. It’s better to be on the safe side.
Conclusion
As you can see, writing an article for your website is not everything. You could be mislead that in one hour you will be done, and in 30 hours, your website will be full of content, completed and making easy money for you. That is totally not true as you can see the breakdown above. So, before starting a website, you can now estimate the time and cost of posting articles for your future website.
