From Beginner to Pro: A Complete Guide to Tripling Your Email Conversion Rate

You’re building your email list, right?

If you’re not, you need to start today. 

Email is by far the most effective marketing channel we have today. Capterra found that the average return on $1 spent on email marketing is $44.25. Nothing else comes even close. 

Think about it: email gives you the ability to reach your current and potential customers whenever you want. An incredible 91% of people check email at least once a day. 

Having a list gives you more influence over your subscribers’ behavior and allows you to drive page views, sales, reviews, or anything else you’d like. 

Here’s the thing though: it’s not a secret anymore. More and more people and companies recognize the power of email and are gathering email addresses of their customers more aggressively. 

Buy something from a major retail store, and they’ll likely ask you for your email address. 

Regalix reported that 48% of the marketers they surveyed believe that investment in email marketing will only grow in 2015 and beyond. 

In addition, two-thirds of companies are already combining email marketing with other marketing strategies such as content marketing and social media marketing. 

All this competition is making it harder to earn the email addresses of your average Internet browser. Reports of email opt-in rates dropping across the board are increasingly common, and we will see hard data on it soon. 

Nonetheless, I firmly believe you can outperform the average, which consists of all sorts of poorly run businesses. 

In this article, I’m going to show you how to:

• determine what your audience values
• ask for email addresses in the right way
• use tools to quickly gather email addresses from visitors
• determine the optimal places to ask for email addresses

Throughout this post, I’m going to be pointing out dated and ineffective techniques so that you can develop a strategy that works. 

Learn what your audience craves

Back when email was first created, you could just ask for emails, and people would happily give them to you. 

But as I said, inboxes are getting more and more crowded. People will get 204 emails per day in 2015, and it’s projected to increase by about 3% in each subsequent year. 

This has led everyone to become more cautious about handing out their email address. If you want your audience to give you their email addresses and then engage with the emails you send, they have to do it happily and voluntarily. 

How do you get them to do that? Offer them something they want.

The concept of a lead magnet isn’t new. Give your audience a free e-book or a white report in exchange for their contact information.

What is relatively new, however, is creating a lead magnet the right way. Too many businesses blindly make the first lead magnet that comes to mind thinking that it doesn’t make a difference. But it does. 

The biggest difference between websites that get a 20% opt-in rate (although that’s rare) and those that get 3% or less is how targeted their lead magnets are. 

Create something that your visitors crave, and they’ll practically be forced to give you their emails. Create something that only some of your visitors want, or only want a little bit, and you’ll be left almost empty-handed.

I want you to create content and lead magnets that your readers will love, so I’m going to show you three different methods to determine what they crave the most. 

Method 1: Validate that your audience is interested in a topic

If you have a blog that gets consistent traffic, this will be extremely easy. 

If you want to see what your audience is most interested in, simply look at the number of times they’ve viewed each article. Additionally, you can look at the number of comments and social shares generated by the articles. 

Create a spreadsheet with all your top posts and their traffic stats over a reasonable period (at least three months).

Sort by traffic, and you will see the topics that your specific audience cares about the most.

Then, you can create an offer around those topics. You can use this offer as a content upgrade, or you can promote it around your website. 

Here are a couple of examples:

• Article: “22 Gmail Plugins That All Content Marketers Need to Know About”
• Offer: Get the exact templates I use to reach out to influencers 

• Article: “How to Make Custom Images for Your Blog Posts Without Hiring a Designer”
• Offer: A private list of 10 designers who will create custom images for $5 per image 

Method 2: See what your competitors are offering

If you have a new site or one with few posts and low traffic levels, you can’t use Method 1. What you can do, however, is look at your competitors. 

Your most visible competitors have likely been blogging for years. You can take advantage of their experience by seeing what their audience likes the most.

Start by identifying 5-10 competitors. 

Add these to a blank spreadsheet. Next to each competitor, create a column for their main lead magnet and 5 more columns for their 5 most popular posts.

To find the main lead magnet, visit the blog (usually the Home page), and look for a highlighted area:

Record the title and a short description (optional) in your spreadsheet.

Next, we need the most popular posts. Some bloggers will include a “Popular Posts” widget in the sidebar. Personally, I don’t trust it because it can be manipulated (and often is). 

Instead, use BuzzSumo (a free account will do) to find the most shared posts. Enter your competitor’s URL into the content explorer, and sort by total shares. 

Record the headlines of the top 5 posts into your spreadsheet: 

Here’s what your sheet should look like. Keep going until you’ve filled it in.

This spreadsheet has a few extremely practical applications.

First, it tells us what lead magnet each blogger has found to convert the best—at least for now (further testing could prove otherwise). 

If you were starting a blog in this space and had the background to write a short e-book titled How to Get Your First 10,000 Subscribers, you can be confident that it would convert well based on the Social Triggers’ lead magnet.

The second application is just as useful in my opinion. One danger of simply creating a lead magnet along the same lines as the existing ones is that you could be perceived as a copycat. 

In scenario, if I’m a blogger looking for traffic and subscriber advice and come across both your site and Social Triggers, I’m probably not signing up for both. I’ll pick the one that looks most credible, which is the one on an established authority site. 

Now go back to your spreadsheet. 

You have a list of posts that resonate with the readers of your niche. Categorize all the posts to reveal the most popular general topics:

With the limited selection of posts in my spreadsheet, I identified 4 categories:

• Writing better (4 posts)
• Learning why blogs succeed (2)
• Selling online (2)
• Increasing traffic and subscribers (2) 

Now, look at the top categories that you just identified, and look at the lead magnets offered by your competitors. Find the gap. 

It’s clear from my very limited analysis that bloggers currently care a lot about writing better. This makes sense given the shift towards higher quality content. 

Boost Blog Traffic’s Headline Hacks is about writing great headlines, but you could focus your offer on a different area of writing. You could base a lead magnet on those popular posts you recorded in that category. 

For example:

• The 20 Words All Successful Bloggers Use in Their Writing
• 51 Essential Time-Saving Resources for Any Blogger
• Free e-book: The Simple Way I Write 1,000-Word High Quality Posts in an Hour 

Don’t just create another lead magnet

The biggest mistake marketers make when creating lead magnets is that they make offers that are too vague. 

You must create a useful offer that solves one specific problem in your reader’s life. 

Otherwise, you won’t make a lasting impression on your new subscriber. They’ll throw out your freebie once they go through it, and there’s a good chance they’ll unsubscribe the first chance they get. 

But if you do make a great first impression and deliver something that makes a difference in their life in the short term, they won’t forget you.

Your lead magnet can be in any format. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it:

• is about something your reader cares about,
• delivers massive value (high quality), and
• accomplishes (at least) one specific thing in your subscriber’s life.

To make things crystal clear, let’s look at some examples. 

Example 1: E-books

While e-books can be great lead magnets, they can also be terrible. They don’t need to be long, but they need to address a specific topic. Too often, e-books are filled with fluff for the sake of filling pages. 

That being said, a good e-book allows you to dive into a fairly complex issue in a way that a checklist or worksheet can’t.

Michael Hyatt offers a free e-book with a very specific claim: take 10 hours off your work week. This is a great topic because you’ll see the results almost immediately.

In addition, he’s a best-selling author and a successful person, which he highlights just before he offers the book. It’s always a good idea to establish credibility to help reduce friction.

Example 2: Free Courses

I love using free courses as a giveaway. Not only do you get your subscriber to continuously refer to your material and get more familiar with you, but you also get them into the habit of reading your emails. 

One other advantage of giving away a course is that subscribers usually perceive courses to be more valuable, so they take them more seriously. 

I give away a course on Quick Sprout in the sidebar. 

It solves one problem—getting more traffic—by showing you how to double your traffic. Note that I made a specific claim—“double your traffic”—which gives my subscribers a way to measure their progress.

Also note that I value the course at $300. Most subscribers find this to be a reasonable amount for the value I give away in the course. 

Putting that number on the opt-in form makes the future readers more likely to subscribe. Wouldn’t you want to pay for a $300 course with an email address, which costs you nothing?

Example 3: Lists

If you’re an expert in some field, you can use your expertise to deliver massive value without spending a lot of time on an offer.

On BloggerJet, Tim Soulo offers a list of his personal top 15 tools for getting traffic and subscribers from Twitter.

A list is easy to write as long as you know what should go into it. Since Tim has a ton of experience with Twitter marketing, this probably took him an hour or two to put together. 

There are two great things about a list like this.

First, everyone loves tools. They make life easier and often produce more reliable results than tasks done manually. 

Second, if a subscriber uses just one tool on that list, they are going to think of Tim every time they use it. It’s great for building your personal brand and getting high email open rates in the future. 

Example 4: Free Trial

What if you don’t run a blog-based business? Don’t worry—lead magnets can still work well for you. 

Any company with a product, particularly a scalable one such as software, instantly has something of value to offer: a free trial. 

Not only will this increase your initial sign-up rates but it will also increase your conversion rates down the line because people don’t like losing things they already have. 

When you express interest in Groove, for example, you don’t even have to provide any credit card information. All they ask is for your contact information in exchange for a 30-day trial.

How to ask for email addresses in 2015

If you walked into your favorite clothing store and a sales person ran up to you screaming and waving the store’s latest deal in your face, you’d run away. The offer is important, but so is the way you present it.

The truth about pop-ups

Pop-ups are an amazing way to increase your email sign-up rate, but they can also easily piss off your visitors if you’re not careful.

The average pop-up conversion rate is 1.66%. That’s pretty good for an average. If your blog has a low to medium amount traffic, you should be able to achieve at least double that number after some optimization.

Look at how using pop-ups affected email opt-ins on a cooking blog:

Can you spot when they were first introduced?

But you might be scared that pop-ups will make your visitors instantly hit the back button on their browsers. You don’t need to be. 

Some blogs find that pop-ups don’t change their bounce rate or the average time spent reading a post. 

What that says is that when implemented correctly, pop-ups aren’t annoying enough to scare away interested readers. They may scare away people who didn’t really want to read anyway, but that’s not a big loss. 

The question then becomes: how do you use pop-ups correctly? 

It comes down to 3 factors. 

Factor #1: Time until pop-up is displayed

Some readers, even if they’re loyal fans, will immediately close the window if they see a pop-up right away. 

One test found that the optimal time to show a pop-up was at 10 seconds after the page loaded:

These are the results that you would expect. If you get surprised the second you walk in the store, you leave.

But you must test this on your own site. The guys at Authority Hacker found a different result. A test revealed that the optimal time for a pop-up on their site was right as the page loaded.

That being said, at the time of this writing, their pop-up appears to load about 12 seconds after the page is loaded. Perhaps they had an insufficient sample size for the first test. 

Either way, the main takeaway is to always test what’s best for your business. 

Another option that can work great is to display the pop-up only when someone is about to close the page or tab in their browser. This is called exit-intent technology, and it is usually a premium feature of pop-up software. 

XeroShoes used exit-intent activated pop-ups and were able to increase their overall opt-in rate by 2.5%.

 

Factor #2: Frequency

If you really want to scare away your readers, show them the same pop-up every time they load a new page. 

With all pop-up software, you can set a cookie for a certain length of time. As long as a visitor doesn’t clear their cookies, they won’t see another pop-up on your site for that length of time. If you set it for at least a week, you should be fine. 

Factor #3: Ease of closing

This is arguably the most important factor. If you make it difficult to close the pop-up, people will abandon your site in droves. 

It’s not always on purpose, but any pop-up with only a small hard-to-see “x” will be hard to close. It’s mainly because readers can’t find the button. 

Even worse, some pop-ups have no obvious close button at all, only a hard-to-read link.

Not only are these links hard to close on desktops and laptops, but they are often nearly impossible to close on mobile devices. If your blog has a large mobile audience, double-check how your pop-up shows up on mobile devices.

A safer alternative: Slide-in forms

If you’re really against pop-ups, which I do understand, you can still harness a lot of their power with slide-in offers. 

Once you scroll down a certain amount, a nifty little pop-up in the bottom right corner slides in displaying whatever text or links you choose. They only take up a fraction of the screen and don’t interfere with reading the post. However, because they move, they still draw attention based on pattern interruption. 

The best example of these are on HubSpot blog posts.

When HubSpot first tested these slide-in forms against their standard static form at the bottom of each post, they found that the slide-in forms increased their conversions by 27%.

But be careful: these can also be a pain on mobile devices, so check them too. I’ve seen a few comments by HubSpot readers who’ve had problems with them:

Designing a high-converting opt-in form

Regardless of whether you’re designing a static opt-in form or a pop-up of some kind, you have to apply the same principles if you want to create an opt-in that converts well.

In general, you have to consider three essentials factors: your offer, your headline, and your call to action (CTA).

Factor #1: A valuable offer

There’s a reason that this was the first point we looked at in this article. You need something that your readers will care about enough to give their email addresses for.

Factor #2: A clear headline

This is simple but important. This is not a typical headline where you might incorporate clickbait tactics. Clearly state the title of your lead magnet, possibly preceded by “Download”, “Get a copy of”, or a similar phrase. 

Factor #3: A first person CTA

First, you need a CTA. Once your visitor inputs their email address into the text form, tell them what to do to get their freebie. 

To boost your conversion rate, write your CTA in the first person. 

Content Verve tested the first person versus second person CTAs and found that the first person CTA attracted 25% and 90% increases in clicks in two different tests.

Try to write your button CTA in terms of the benefit your offer will provide. For example:

• “Yes, I want more traffic”
• “Show me how to get more subscribers”
• “Give me your secrets”

On Social Triggers, Derek Halpern swaps the traditional close “x” for an entire close button. Instead of hiding it, he uses first person CTAs for both the yes and no buttons.

Notice that in order to close the pop-up, you have to read “I reject the free e-book”, which sounds silly if you say it to yourself. This is just the latest test in a series, but I suspect it’s performing quite well.

The most effective email collecting tools

If you want to use a static opt-in form, you’ll need to have a developer design it, or you can modify templates provided by your email marketing provider (Aweber, MailChimp, etc.). 

But the most effective email collecting tools by far, as we’ve seen, are pop-ups. To implement them on your site, you will need to use a specific tool designed for this purpose. 

To cover all price ranges, I’ve chosen three options that work with WordPress. Be aware that as the price goes down, the amount of work you have to do typically goes up, and the tools become less convenient.

Option 1: Hello Bar

Hello Bar offers a lot of features to capture more emails.

Cost: The free plan covers most features. 

The pop-ups that this product makes are very simple and minimalistic. That being said, they’re fairly attractive and non-intrusive.

The neat thing about this tool is that I use it on my blogs. It’s how I was able to grow them to over 100,000 subscribers.

Option 2: OptinMonster

Created by Syed Balkhi and Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster is an affordable mid-range pop-up tool option. 

Cost: Minimum $49/year (about $4/month) for basic features.

You can quickly create a pop-up using any of the several templates available. In addition, you can also do A/B testing, which is a great feature. This feature is included in the basic plan (typically in advanced plans in other tools).

Option 3: LeadPages

It’s one of the most comprehensive email collection tools out there. 

Cost: Minimum $25/month for basic features. 

LeadPages software is very well designed, but it costs a lot more than other pop-up options because you’re paying for other features as well.

Originally, LeadPages existed to help you create high-converting landing pages. They only expanded to pop-up technology once they saw the need for it.

If you go with the basic plan (you can’t just get the pop-up tool on its own), you also get unlimited landing pages. If you have many domains or regularly create landing pages, it’s a solid option.

The best places to ask for email addresses

There’s one last piece of the puzzle missing: where to ask for your readers’ email addresses.

The traditional way is the sidebar. You don’t need a sign-up form in the sidebar. Most forms placed there will get a subscription rate of about 0.4%. Even a well done sidebar form only converts at about 1%. 

I’m not saying you can’t have one, just be aware that it isn’t really necessary and will only make up a small fraction of your signups. 

1. The Home page

A large portion of your traffic will end up on your Home page. Most of that traffic will come from other parts of your website, which means that the visitors were interested in exploring it further. 

These readers can be converted very easily with a “feature box.” A feature box is simply a large area near the top of your homepage that stands out and clearly asks for a reader to opt in.

2. In blog posts

Most of the traffic a website gets is to individual blog posts. So, it makes sense to ask for email addresses there.

The problem with sidebar forms is that they are often ignored. But content isn’t.

If you make your offer somewhere within the content, it will get seen more often and convert higher. 

The first place to start is after your post. If someone reads it to the end, they are clearly interested in what you have to say. This makes it the perfect time to offer them something more, whether it’s more content or some sort of bonus.

But you don’t necessarily have to wait that long to ask for a signup. You can configure your pop-up to show up after a certain amount of time, or you can simply use a link in the content to trigger your pop-up manually:

This way, you can mention your bonus when it’s most appropriate.

3. The About page

Look at your site analytics. The About page often gets a significant amount of traffic. 

Like with the Home page, anyone who navigates to your About page usually likes what they’ve read. They’re just looking for some more background on you and the site to make sure you’re credible. 

This is a great time to ask for their email address. In fact, often you don’t even need to offer anything other than your content and expertise in order to get high conversion rates.

The secret to exploding your conversion rates

One word: relevance.

When we came up with lead magnet ideas in the first section of this article, we looked at the topics that were most popular with your readers. That’s because the more popular a topic was, the relevant it was to your readers’ issues. 

But what if you could achieve that level of relevance for every post?

This is the principle behind content upgrades and the reason why they can achieve conversion rates of 20% or more on certain posts. 

You create a highly relevant offer for the topic discussed in your post and then offer it somewhere in the post as well as at the end.

For example, I could create either of the following upgrades for this post:

• “See the exact conversion rates of all existing and past Quick Sprout opt-in forms”
• “Free video: Walkthrough of the exact layout I use to get 10%+ opt-in rates”

Those are just hypothetical examples, but wouldn’t you want to give me your email address at this point for either of those (assuming I don’t already have it)?

The upside is an increase in your conversion rates. The downside is that you need to spend more time creating your lead magnets. 

If you create simple content upgrades, they won’t provide much value. They won’t be as effective at keeping you in your subscribers’ minds as targeted content upgrades would, possibly leading to lower email engagement later on. 

If you really want to maximize your conversion rates, you’ll have to spend a decent amount of time creating content upgrades for each post. If you’re putting in 10 or so hours into creating each post anyway, spending another one or two hours for a lot of extra subscribers is worth it. 

One compromise is to create a few different comprehensive lead magnets (e.g., a free course) on the two to four most popular topics that you’ll be writing about often. That way, you’ll always have a relevant offer without having to create a new one every time. You’ll still get great conversion rates, but they’ll be a bit lower than if you had a specific offer for each post.

Derek Halpern has caught on to this strategy and developed three comprehensive lead magnets on different topics that he can promote when appropriate.

Finally, you can always combine the two strategies. There are no fixed rules on what you can offer.

Conclusion

Optimizing your email opt-in rate is not easy—I never said it would be. 

But those of you who take the concepts and strategies in this article to heart—and apply them—will get rewarded. 

If your blog gets 10,000 visitors a month, even a modest 2% increase in your email opt-in rate would be an extra 200 subscribers a month, or 2,400 a year. 

If you treat your list right, that could easily be worth over $10,000.

That should really be the only incentive you need to spend a few hours evaluating your current set up and improving it. 

Remember to use your judgement. Always consider how your audience might react to any specific tactic you implement, and test! Find what works on your site using the guidelines I’ve given you in this article. 

One last thing: I’d appreciate it if you left me a comment below, letting me know what your current email opt-in rate is. Then come back in a few weeks after you’ve implemented this advice to let me know how much it’s increased.

The $100,000 Challenge: June Update

I just wrapped up the third month of Nutrition Secrets, and I have to say, it turned out to be a great month.

When you look at the traffic stats of 33,562 visitors, however, you may think things are not progressing as the traffic only grew by 1,297 visitors. But all signals are pointing in the right direction.

Here’s what happened in the month of June… 

Started to focus more on search traffic

Our search traffic hasn’t climbed by much, but the blog is only 3-months old. Technically speaking, you can even say it is 2-months old as the domain name was switched after the first month.

For the month of June, Nutrition Secrets received 3,675 search engine visitors, which is a 106% increase over the previous month.

Typically, whenever you start a new blog, you have to wait 5 to 6 months before you start seeing good growth in search traffic. Why? Because search engines don’t just look at on-page code and links. They look at factors such as bounce rate, time on site, etc.

As your metrics hold steady or improve, they reward you over time. This prevents new sites from popping up and spamming their way to the top of Google.

Big drop in Facebook traffic

On June 20th, all of my blogs had a drop in traffic from my Facebook fan pages. Nutrition Secret saw something similar, and I ended up taking a big hit as the majority of the traffic was coming from the social web.

In addition to that, the post titles and topics focused more on targeting SEO and not social media. For example, topics such as “13 Fatty Foods That Are Surprisingly Healthy” did really well on Facebook because they were on unique topics that evoked curiosity.

But when you look at the search volume for these phrases, you’ll notice that the volume is really low. So instead, I had Mike shift his focus toward writing on topics that were more mainstream and would pick up more search traffic in the long run.

I even created an Excel spreadsheet for him that helps him generate topic ideas based on search volume and popularity on the social web. (I’ll share it with you next month so you can use it for your own blog.)

Content production is up

If you look at the month of June, you’ll notice that we posted roughly 5 times a week. I taught Mike the exact process I have been using on Quick Sprout to write content at a rapid pace.

I even broke down the process on Quick Sprout in these 2 blog posts for you:

• How to Double Your Writing Speed Without Lowering Its Quality
• 13 Important Questions You Need to Ask Yourself Before Blogging

Mike is now able to write a blog post within 1.5 to 2 hours. Over the course of the next 30 days, I want him to be able to write a blog post in less than 1.5 hours so I can get him to write 2 posts a day. Sure, the content may be a bit shorter, but it should be doable since he isn’t writing 5,000-word posts like I am on Quick Sprout.

In the long run, this will help the site generate more comments, search traffic, and social shares.

Comments come from email

If you look at the comments on the Nutrition Secrets blog, you’ll notice that a lot of them are from the same people. Why? Because those people are subscribed to our email list.

Roughly 81% of all the comments on the blog are from people who are subscribed to the email list. Currently, the email list is only growing by a few subscribers a day, and every once in a while, we see a spike in opt-ins if a post does well on Facebook, but generally it’s not growing fast enough.

The traffic is there, but the opt-in offer isn’t too appealing. I will have Mike create some sort of a 30-day nutrition course, which we will use as an opt-in bribe. This should help increase the number of opt-ins to a few thousand a month.

Fixing mobile issues

The interesting thing about Nutrition Secrets is that over 54.4% of our traffic comes from mobile and tablet devices. But if you look at our mobile load time, you’ll see it could be improved.

I will have Mike focus on improving it. WordPress plugins that compress image sizes and cache the blog will help. As those metrics improve, search traffic will also start increasing at a faster rate.

Link building

The majority of the links we acquired are from other resource pages.

Here is how we get them. Mike searches the web with queries such as “nutrition resources” to find pages and sites that should be linking to our blog.

A good portion of the people we reached out to in June haven’t linked back, but that is mainly because we are going after EDU sites. It’s summer, which means most colleges are not in session.

So we are shifting our focus to building links from resource pages that aren’t on EDU sites.

In addition to that, we found that a couple of spammy sites linked to us. Here is one of the links. As you can see, the site isn’t the highest in quality, but there isn’t much we can do.

This happens to all websites, and you could disavow the link through Webmaster Tools, but there is no point if it’s only a small portion of your links.

Google is smart, and it knows it’s inevitable for you to have a few bad links. Because of that, it typically doesn’t penalize sites when this happens.

Mike’s also been building relationships with authors on sites like GQ, Vogue, and other magazine sites that have our ideal audience. We haven’t received any links from them yet, but we should once we start asking.

Currently, Mike is following these steps before he asks these people for a link. We’ll see how it goes in the next 30 days.

The one big issue we have been running into when building links is that people are removing links because they think Mike isn’t certified. His certification allows him to give advice on nutrition and fitness. I told him to update his bio to include this and create an about page to talk about the purpose of the blog as well as showcase his certifications.

Once he does this, we should be able to generate more links and hopefully keep them longer. In the meantime, he’s been emailing people who are removing the links and sending them a screenshot of his certificate. The only issue is, not everyone reads all of their emails, which means we are still losing links.

Strong signals

Although the traffic on the nutrition blog isn’t growing as fast as I would like it to, all the signals are pointing in the right direction. The content is great; people are commenting; and the rankings are climbing fast.

For example, the blog ranks on page 5 for the keyword “nutrition.” I know it is a vague search term and getting on page 1 will be hard…but we aren’t even trying to rank for that term.

We are also starting to rank for terms such as “lose lower belly fat.” We aren’t seeing a huge increase in traffic yet because moving up from page 4 to page 3 doesn’t do much. But once the site starts ranking on page 1, our search traffic will skyrocket.

Currently, we aren’t trying to rank for any specific term, and we aren’t building rich anchor text links. Instead, we are trying to write good educational content in hopes that people will want to link to us when we show them how great Nutrition Secrets is.

Conclusion

I still haven’t focused on monetizing the blog yet, but I will start within the next few months. The revenue will largely come from the email list, so I need to focus on growing it first, which will happen in July.

As for expenses, they have stayed more or less flat. Total expenses, since the start of the project, have been $2,889.74 dollars. In June, I spent $219, which went towards Aweber and hand-drawn images for Facebook.

What do you think about the progress so far? Do you think I’ll be able to generate $100,000 a month in income within 12 months?

How to Double Your Writing Speed Without Lowering Its Quality

How in the world do they do it?

Day after day, they write monstrous posts that are extremely useful and easy to read.

You know the people I’m talking about—you might even consider me to be one of them.

Here’s what a typical week looks like for me in terms of blog content alone:

• 2 posts on Quick Sprout (1,000-5,000 words each) plus an infographic
• 2 posts on the NeilPatel.com blog (about 5,000 words each)
• 2 guest posts on other popular blogs (about 1,500 words each)
• 0.5-1 blog post for the Crazy Egg blog (about 2 per month at about 2,000 words each)

Total that up, and you get around 17,000 words per week or 3,400 words per weekday.

And I’ve been able to sustain this type of volume for years.

I’m the first to admit that in technical terms, I’m not the best writer. I certainly didn’t go to college to get a degree in English or creative writing. Yet, I have thousands of awesome readers who really enjoy what I write.

There’s a reason I spent much time learning first how to write quality blog posts and then how to write them fast.

Although time is my most valuable resource, I spend a significant chunk of it every week writing. That’s because I know how effective content marketing can be for a business.

But I’m far from the only one.

Contently found that 41% of businesses struggle with creating enough content.

Wouldn’t it be easier to create more content if you could write faster?

If you need to learn how to write a great post, start by checking out my guide to writing high quality data-driven articles.

If you already write high quality posts but it takes you a long time to do it, then this article is for you. I’m going to show you 11 key concepts that you can start using today to start writing faster.

Imagine being able to write posts in half the time you currently do now! That would free up a lot of time to either write more posts or work on other parts of your business.

An extra few posts a week can greatly speed up your business’ growth, possibly by years. 

1. Get your typing up to speed

No matter how well you can remain focused for long period of times and how fast you can think of what to say, if you can’t type at a decent speed, you’ll never write quickly.

If you’re still pecking at letters, one finger at a time, it’s not going to cut it.

You don’t have to be a master typist, but you should be able to type at least 60 words per minute (60 WPM). If you could type at that speed for an hour straight, that would be 3,600 words per hour. Obviously that’s unrealistic, but you can achieve a decent fraction of that production rate.

I’d like you to take a minute to test your typing speed. Head to Key Hero, and do a quick typing test:

If you’d like to repeat it a few times to get a more accurate result, go ahead.

If your speed is under 60 WPM, you’ll have to fix that before you can worry about any of the other concepts in this article. I know it’s not the most fun thing in the world, but you’ll be grateful you did it in the long run.

Step 1: Use the proper hand placement

To type properly, you should be resting the four fingers of each hand on the keys of the middle row, with your thumbs hovering over the space bar.

If you don’t already do this, it will take a bit of practice for it to feel natural.

Step 2: Don’t look at the keyboard

You should be able to type with your eyes closed—literally. If you can’t, it means you need to practice to get you to the point when typing no longer requires an active focus (the unconscious takes care of it).

Part of this can be your posture. If you’re hunched over while sitting, it’s possible that you’re looking at the keyboard just because that’s where your line of sight is. Do your best to sit up straight when writing.

Step 3: Practice, practice, practice

Kids these days practice typing from a young age, but you might not have been so lucky. The good news is that you can find online tools to help you practice and learn. One example is the Key Hero practice tools. If you need more instruction from the beginning, use a typing tutor tool:

Alternative: Try speech-to-text software

You have a number of speech-to-text tools you can use, e.g., TalkTyper (free), Ivona (paid), and Dragon Naturally Speaking (paid). These tools allow you to simply talk to your computer while it records your words and whatever punctuation you indicate.

While you can obviously talk faster than you can type, there are some downsides to this method. The free or cheap tools aren’t always accurate, and it can take a lot of time to fix the mistakes those programs make. Even the expensive ones aren’t perfect, and they also have a steep learning curve at first.

It’s not the first option I’d recommend, but if for some reason you aren’t able to type, or type quickly, it’s a decent backup.

2. Don’t forget your ideas: make a list

How much time do you waste trying to come up with a good idea for a blog post?

It’s hard enough if you’re just writing a couple of them a week, but if I had to come up with ideas for all the posts I write one at a time, I don’t know if I could do it.

The good news is: there’s a better way. It’s called an idea list.

Coming up with ideas on demand can be difficult because it’s a creative task. Creativity comes and goes as we observe and experience different things in our lives. It’s why book writers often take years to write their novels.

You can’t just sit down and say to yourself, “Okay brain, start coming up with great ideas.”

Instead, you need to develop your idea muscle so that you can spontaneously come up with many ideas throughout the day.

The concept of an idea muscle was coined by James Altucher, who says that as you practice coming up with ideas, you get better at it.

“Every situation you are in, you will have a ton of ideas. Any question  you are asked, you will know the response. Every meeting you are at, you will take the meeting so far out of the box you’ll be on another planet, if you are stuck on a desert highway – you will figure the way out, if you need to make money you’ll come up with 50 ideas to make  money, and so on.” — James Altucher

He advises to start by trying to come up with at least 10 ideas throughout the day.

Here’s the second part: record them. Not all of these ideas will be good, but some will be, and others may lead you to good ideas.

You can use a simple notepad from the dollar store, or you can do what the team at Buffer does and record ideas in Trello:

An alternative: create a repeatable strategy

I’ve already shown you how to steal ideas for your next post. This is a strategy that you can use over and over again to get inspiration for post ideas.

It’s still not a good idea to come up with post ideas as you need them—it’s inefficient. Instead, schedule a block of time, maybe an hour, every week or month (depending on your post volume). Use this time to use your strategy to come up with as many ideas as you can.

Instead of coming up with a single idea in 10 minutes every time you need one, you can come up with five times the number of ideas in the same time frame once you get some momentum going.

Either way, you’ll be able to cut down on time coming up with ideas and focus more time and energy on the actual writing.

3. Get rid of distractions

Distractions are everywhere, especially on the computer.

The urge to check email, visit social media sites, or just click a bookmark to go to your favorite site to kill time is strong.

Maybe you’d rather check your search engine rankings again or website traffic instead of writing a post, which seems way less fun.

If you give into these urges, your productivity is going to go way down. But even if you don’t, those urges in the back of your head are going to distract you and prevent you from being as productive as possible.

In real life, there are even more distractions, especially if you work from home. Kids running around, people talking on the phone or watching TV, and temptation to take a break and grab a snack.

Distractions are everywhere.

You’ll never get rid of them all, but you can get rid of many, which will greatly boost your writing speed.

Distraction elimination #1: Work in an office or quiet space

Noise kills writing productivity. You need to be able to hear your thoughts uninterrupted. If you work from home, designate a room as your office, and make sure that no one disturbs you while the door is closed.

If you’re working at an office or co-working space, keep your door closed while writing. Tell any friends or coworkers to not disturb you while the door is closed unless there is an emergency.

If neither of those are realistic, head to a library. Libraries are quiet, and some even have dedicated rooms for silent work.

Distraction elimination #2: Turn off the tunes

Who doesn’t like music? Wouldn’t it be more fun to write while listening to Taylor Swift?

Well, sure, it will be more fun, but it will slow you down when you are writing.

Studies have shown that music is a distraction that slows down complex thought processes. So while music might help you with simple, straight-forward tasks such as lifting more in the gym, it’s going to slow down your writing.

But that’s not the full story. Those studies looked typical lyrical music.

A 2012 study showed that low to moderate levels of ambient noise can actually lead to slightly higher creative output.

Similarly, another study showed that baroque classical music can increase mood and productivity. Note that classical music rarely has any lyrics. It is soft and consistent.

So you have two options: work with no music or work with low to medium volume ambient noise or classical music.

To have some ambient sound in the background, you can use tools such as A Soft Murmur or Simply Noise.

Distraction elimination #3: Lock-down distracting websites

If you have trouble staying on task, you can block certain trouble websites for a designated time period. There are many plugins that can do this, e.g., Strict Workflow for Chrome.

You simply tell the plugin which sites you’d like blocked and for how long, and you won’t be able to access them until the time period is up.

In addition, you can hide your bookmarks bar if you’re working inside a web text application such as Google Docs. Just right-click any empty space in the bookmarks bar and uncheck “show bookmarks bar.”

Distraction elimination #4: Write offline

If blocking distracting sites doesn’t work, you can take it to the next level and disconnect your Internet altogether. Writing offline will eliminate all online distractions.

Distraction elimination #5: Finish all important tasks before writing

Sometimes it’s hard to focus because there’s something else important that you need to do during the day. If you’re thinking about this in the back of your head, your writing speed will go down.

Instead, think about doing any distracting tasks upfront, and then come back to writing later.

4. Outline your post beforehand

Before I write any post, I always outline it.

When you outline a post, you get a really clear idea of how you will be making the point you’re trying to make as well as any research or resources you’ll need to make the article as strong as possible.

You’ll notice that all of my posts have an introduction section (like everyone else’s posts would have) and also a conclusion section.

The headlines of the other sections will depend on the type of post I’m writing. There are 12 main types of posts, and I have general outlines for all of them.

The outlines don’t need to take very long to put together. Their main point is to make sure you’re not missing any important pieces of the puzzle.

I write out all the subheadlines (H2s) in the article as well as a few main bullet points below each to remind me what I should cover.

When I get to each section while writing, I don’t have to remember what I had in mind for this section before—it’s already there.

5. Research comes first

What do you think is easier to write about for me: how to ride a horse or how to write a good blog post?

Of course, how to write a good blog post is a simpler topic for me because it’s a topic that I have a lot of experience and expertise in.

The first step is to become an expert on the topic you’re writing about. It’s easy to talk/write about something you know well but difficult if you’re trying to put the pieces together as you go.

Take my nutrition blog case study. I’m not a nutrition expert, and I didn’t have the time to invest in becoming well-versed in the subject so that I could write about it credibly. That’s why I had Mike take over content creation.

This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert from day one, but you need at the very least to learn about the specific topic you’re writing about before starting.

Otherwise, task switching is going to kill your writing speed.

What’s task switching? It’s a concept that refers to having to switch between different activities. For example, having to switch from writing mode to research mode because you don’t understand a concept you need for a particular article.

While some may multitask better than others, we all are more productive when we focus on a single task.

Dr. David Meyer and colleagues conducted a study in 2001 to quantify the effects of task switching. He had subjects try to switch between different tasks such as solving math problems and naming geometric objects.

When both problems were simple, subjects didn’t lose much time going back and forth. But as the tasks became complex, the subjects lost more and more time with each switch.

It’s hard to pin down the exact cost of switching, but Meyer estimated that it could cost someone up to 40% of their productivity for complex tasks. Make no mistake, writing and researching are complex tasks.

Every time you have to switch, it not only takes a bit of time (up to a few seconds) to get into the right mindset, but it also fatigues you. Just thinking about having to switch back and forth several times an hour makes me tired.

Here’s the takeaway: learn everything you need to know about the topic you are writing about before you write a single word. This means that you should note down any relevant statistics, resources, or findings from studies beforehand.

6. Write first, edit later

Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is garbage.”

I’m not sure how much fiction you read, but Hemingway was one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.

He won a Nobel Prize in Literature and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction before he died. Even now, we remember his writing genius.

If Hemingway thought his first drafts were garbage, imagine what he’d think of mine or yours.

So, you basically have two options if you want to write a post that doesn’t suck.

First, you can continually edit each sentence and paragraph as you go. Or you can write your first draft like most prolific writers do, and then edit later.

Both can produce a good article, but I’ll tell you why the second option is by far the best choice.

If you continually switch between writing and editing, you have the same problem that we looked at before: task switching. You’re asking your brain to switch from trying to write to trying to edit. This kills any writing momentum you have and makes you start from scratch every sentence or paragraph.

When you write—just write—you can focus on writing only. This allows your mind to focus on what you should write now and what should come next. Similarly, when you’re editing, all your focus can be on “how can I make this better?” instead of also trying to think of what needs to be said next.

In my experience, Meyer’s guess of about a 40% decrease in productivity from task switching is probably about right.

Write first, edit second.

7. Take (smart) breaks

Unless you’re a robot, you need breaks. All people get tired.

Sure, you can get stronger over time, but you’ll still need breaks.

Everyone’s different in this aspect. Some need frequent breaks, while others only need breaks after a few hours. It depends on how much you enjoy writing, your writing ability, and a few personal factors.

If you’re not sure where to start, I recommend the Pomodoro Technique. Yes, pomodoro means “tomato” in Italian, so essentially it’s a tomato technique. It’s named after the timer that the creator used:

It was designed in the 1980s by Francesco Cirillo. Even though it’s not new, it hasn’t been until the last decade or so that it really became popular as a productivity technique.

Here’s how it works:

• You set a timer for 25 minutes
• You work until the timer finishes
• You take a 5 minute break
  • All of that is one Pomodoro

Now you repeat that process four times. After the 4th 30-minute period, you take a 15-20 minute break.

You can either buy a pomodoro timer or just use this online tomato timer.

This procedure is supposed to keep you focused and fresh while working.

For accountability purposes, you are supposed to start the day by making a to-do list of what you’d like to accomplish.

You put an “X” beside each item to indicate how many pomodoro periods (25 minutes of work) it took to finish.

“You will probably begin to notice a difference in your work or study process within a day or two. True mastery of the technique takes from seven to twenty days of constant use.”

The final piece of the system is dealing with interruptions. There are two types of interruptions: internal and external.

Internal interruptions are thoughts that are distracting you from working. With this system, if they are important tasks, you are supposed to write them down on your to-do sheet so that you can be sure they will get done later.

External interruptions are from other people and things (phones, emails, etc.). The pomodoro system suggests to deal with such interruptions as quickly as possible. Tell the people who want your attention now to come back later or promise them you’ll call them back as soon as you can (on a break). In the meantime, get back to work.

8. Give yourself a deadline

Parkinson’s law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.

This means if you give yourself too much time to finish something, or that you don’t think it matters when you finish it, it will take longer to do. Either you’ll procrastinate because you know you can do it quickly, or it’ll become increasingly complex, which will result in accomplishing something other than what you set out to do.

Think about how most people study for a test. They put it off as long as possible and then cram everything in at the last possible minute.

While it’s not optimal from a learning point of view, it illustrates that people are capable of working extremely quickly when there’s a firm deadline that must be met.

The problem many professional writers have is that they give themselves a day to write a post, even if they may not need it. They say that if they finish early, they’ll start working on something else—but they never do finish early because the work expands to fill the available time.

When you start writing a post, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to include in the post, nothing more. Then, give yourself a deadline for writing the post, which is equal to the minimum amount of time you think you might need.

Remember that this is just for writing the post, which you want to do as quickly as possible. The quality really comes from the editing. You should still have a deadline, but don’t make it strict since you will need your creativity and careful thought.

Don’t limit deadlines to your writing only. You can also set a deadline for checking emails in the morning. Most people spend over 2 hours on email a day, when they could probably reduce it to two 10-minute periods, in the morning and at night, if they set a hard deadline.

9. Write during your most productive time

You’ve heard that some people work better in the morning and some at night, right?

Morning people are called “early birds,” while people who prefer the night are called “night owls.”

It turns out that there’s a significant amount of science backing up this phenomenon. German scientists found that night owls had a different brain composition than early risers.

This affects your circadian rhythm, which is responsible for controlling your sleep schedule and alertness throughout your day. Dr. Katherine Sharkey says that night owls have longer circadian rhythms than early risers.

We don’t need to know exactly how it works to see how it affects how we write.

If you find that you’re much more productive in the morning, write in the morning.

If you find that you’re much more productive in the evening, write in the evening.

Simple.

You will accomplish more in one really productive hour of writing than you would with more time but struggling to focus.

10. Use simple words

Do you ever pause while writing in order to think of the perfect word?

If so, you’re wasting time.

When it comes to blog posts, or any type of web content, your writing should be simple.

People have very limited attention spans and like to skim. Jakob Nielson collected data that shows an average visitor reads just 20-28% of the words in a post. If they can’t skim it, they usually skip it. That means your perfect word won’t even be read by most.

When you read complex words, it takes longer to understand them. It’s partly because they are complex words, but it’s also because we don’t see them often.

So not only do complicated words and sentences confuse and deter your readers but they also slow down your writing. Instead of just stopping and thinking about which word to use, write the simplest alternative that comes to mind.

Instead of “convoluted,” write “complex”.

Instead of “disastrous,” write “poor”.

Instead of “proficiency,” write “skill.”

Get what I’m saying? Here are 24 more examples.

If you want to see how you’re doing, put one of your blog posts into this readability score calculator.

Here are the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scores of a few popular writers. I write at about a 4th-grade level. If you use complex words often, your score will be much higher.

11. The one factor behind all great writers

I’ve given you 10 concepts so far that can help you write faster without rushing and sacrificing quality.

Even if you apply all of these overnight, you still won’t write as quickly as I do by tomorrow.

Writing quickly takes practice, a lot of practice.

Malcolm Gladwell estimates that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. If you write five hours a day, five days a week, that’s about eight years.

I’m probably getting pretty close to that number.

But even if you’re not close, you will get better every step of the way there. So, don’t get discouraged if you can only write 300 words per hour right now. Over time, if you’re truly working on writing faster, it will creep up to 310, then 320, then 350, and so on…

In just a year or two, you might be writing 1,000 words per hour—sooner if you’re a quick learner.

Imagine that for a second: you could effectively double or triple the value of your time. That’s huge.

Conclusion

If you apply just one concept in this article, you can probably increase your writing speed by over 10% within a few days.

If you currently write for 20 hours a week at a rate of 500 words per hour, a 10% improvement alone will give you an extra 1,000 words per week. This is about an article a week for most blogs or 52 extra articles per year without spending any extra time.

If you really take the concepts I’ve laid out here to heart and apply more than one, you could see an even bigger improvement.

Leave me a comment below, letting me know how fast you currently write and how you will attempt to write faster (and let me know how long it takes to type it out!).

13 Important Questions You Need to Ask Yourself Before Blogging

What’s the most important factor of every blog post?

Quality.

But sometimes, it’s easy to find yourself in a grind, cranking out content because you think you’re supposed to.

That’s when quality suffers.

When it comes to blog posts, it’s really all or nothing. A “good” post will get the same engagement and traffic as a “bad” post.

You have to create outstanding posts on a regular basis for your content to make a real difference.

Willpower can help you create these posts, but studies have shown that people have limited willpower.

Did you know that of 86% of marketers who use content marketing, only 30% have a consistent content strategy?

These marketers don’t have the systems in place to maximize the return on their efforts.

If you are one of the 70% of marketers creating more content this year than last year, you need to ensure you maintain a high quality writing standard throughout your content creation.

To help you maintain that quality, I’m giving you 13 questions you should ask yourself before and after writing a blog post.

Not all of these will apply to your specific business, but most will. Once you read through this article, download this simple checklist of questions to keep you accountable. Go through them for every post to ensure your continuous success. 

1. “Who is this post for?”

Have you heard that when you write a post, you should do it as if you’re writing to one specific person?

It’s true. That’s how you craft an article that really resonates with someone.

If you run a new or small blog, this is a fairly easy question to answer: write to your target audience. Before each post, think of your customer avatar, and write to him/her.

But what about once you grow?

All of a sudden, you’ve attracted different types of people with one or more shared interests.

For example, Quick Sprout readers are made up of many types of people. Some are beginners trying to learn about marketing; others are employed professional marketers; and yet others are trying to market their own small businesses. And there are a few more distinct types of readers on top of that.

When I write a post, I know that it’s likely not going to resonate with everyone—that only happens once in a blue moon. But that’s okay.

Most often, a piece of content will speak to one or two segments of my audience. As long as I change it up, they all will find at least a few articles per month they will enjoy. This is another reason why consistent content creation is important.

Let’s look at some examples from Quick Sprout…

How to Make Custom Images for Your Blog Posts Without Hiring a Designer

Many beginner marketers don’t have the budget to hire a designer. This post was for them. Some small business owners might also find this article useful.

How to Come Up with Winning A/B Tests Using Data

This post was not meant for newbie marketers. While they will learn a few things, they won’t be able to apply them right away. This post was for marketers working with a significant amount of traffic and looking to increase already substantial profits.

Is It Worth Speaking at Conferences? 

There is a very small portion of marketers who have the opportunity or desire to speak at conferences, and yet I wrote this post—for them. Some beginner marketers might find it interesting and consider speaking at conferences in the future, but it’s unlikely they’ll be able to apply any of the insights right away.

If you happen to run a blog with decent traffic, make sure you create detailed reader personas you can target with each post. Don’t let any important segment feel neglected as you plan your content schedule.

2. “What is the purpose of this post?”

Now that you know who you’re writing the post for, you need to decide what you want the post to accomplish.

In general, a post has 4 purposes:

• to entertain
• to solve a problem
• to encourage discussion
• to teach (not always the same as solving a problem)

Purpose #1: Entertain

Almost all posts contain entertaining parts, but their main goal is not entertainment. Conversely, some posts have a main goal of being interesting and entertaining, with only a small educational part.

Example: The $100,000 Challenge: May Update

You might learn a few things from each challenge update, but more than anything, they are entertaining. A large portion of Quick Sprout readers have never built a site that’s profitable, and they have a great interest in trying or seeing how it’s done. This post serves as an inspiration to help them move towards their own blogging goals.

Purpose #2: Solve a problem

The fundamental reason why most blogs are created in the first place is to solve a problem for a specific type of reader. That problem is typically large and complex. Each blog post has the opportunity to solve a smaller problem within that overall problem.

Example: How to Engage and Persuade People Through Storytelling

Most marketers know the power of storytelling but struggle to implement it. This is a problem. This particular blog post shows them how to solve this specific problem.

Purpose #3: Encourage discussion

In order to build a community, you need to get your readers to talk. There are many ways to do so, but the main ones are to pose a question or make an outrageous claim or observation.

Example: How to Make $100,000 a Month Within 1 Year

This is a very short post where I laid out the challenge. Not only did I claim the ability to reach a huge goal, but I also asked for your opinions to decide which site I should create. This post is one of the most commented on Quick Sprout with over 2,300 comments.

Purpose #4: Teach

Solving problems and teaching are closely related and often represented in the same blog post. I’d classify teaching as sharing general knowledge your readers need to possess before they can address specific problems. Both are important if your readers are to reach their overall goals (the reason you started your blog).

Example: How to Avoid a Google Penalty

In this article, my readers learn both what causes Google penalties and what precautions they need to take to avoid them. Technically, the reader doesn’t have a problem yet as they don’t have a penalty. In this instance, you could think of teaching as problem prevention.

Multiple Purposes

Some posts combine multiple purposes. For example, the post How Spending $162,301.42 on Clothes Made Me $692,500 is both entertaining and educational as it teaches how much looking your best really means (that sounds more shallow than it is!).

3. “Why will my readers care?”

There is a small but important difference between this question and the previous—“what is the purpose of this post?”—question.

The previous question is about the purpose of the post from your perspective.

This question, however, addresses your readers’ point of view. It will help you frame the blog post.

For example, you may solve a problem with a post, but the reader doesn’t care about the problem. They care about the pain the problem causes.

Why does that matter?

Because there are 2 types of pain points, and both need to be approached differently when writing a blog post.

Type 1: Acute

Acute pains are those that hurt now. You will go to great lengths to solve them. If you find a blog post that tells you how to solve those hurts now, you’re happy to read it. These types of pains (like fixing a Google penalty) are straightforward to write about.

Type 2: Chronic

We often live with a minor pain that comes and goes. It’s not always severe enough to seek out a solution. From a marketing point of view, for example, such a pain might be the stress that comes with a hectic publishing schedule and subpar results.

The problem with trying to solve these pains for people is that almost everyone underestimates how important they are (because they don’t hurt that much right now). Furthermore, we feel that we can live with these pains.

When your blog post solves a chronic pain, you must first focus on making your reader feel the pain before you show them the solution.

If I’m writing about creating a content schedule, for instance, I’m not going to start the post with jumping right into the step-by-step process. I might not even include it in the headline as some people might dismiss it, thinking “I don’t really need that right now.”

Instead, I’d start by illustrating the pain. I’d cite credible statistics about how the lack of a content schedule is the number one reason for failed blogs. I’d describe in detail that without a content schedule, you will never achieve the results of the blogs you admire.

Once a reader relives the pain they’ve felt before, then they are receptive to a solution you present. Then it’s your job to present a solution that actually solves the problem for them.

4. “What is my unique angle?”

Over 7 billion people live on this planet. Most are with reasonably similar points of view.

An original thought is rare.

Type in almost any topic in Google, and you will find hundreds of thousands of relevant articles.

Does that mean you shouldn’t bother blogging at all? No.

Just because a topic has been written about thousands of times doesn’t mean it’s been written in a way that can help your audience in the best way.

You may be able to connect personal experience, opinion, or other seemingly unrelated topics to offer a new perspective. And this perspective is valuable.

When I search for “How to write a good blog post,” I get 270,000 results. But even in the first few results, I can see different angles presented by different authors:

• how to do it when you lack motivation
• how to do it fast
• how to write so that people don’t just skim

In fact, I’ve written my own take on this topic in my guide to writing a data-driven post.

So, how do you find an angle that no one else has written on?

It starts with research

Before writing any post, read through as many of the best articles on the subject as possible. If you don’t, you might be repeating one of them without even knowing it.

This happens all the time in the startup community. Someone believes they have a novel idea—all because they didn’t research enough to see they already have competition.

Once you know what’s out there, you can put your own perspective on the subject in a number of ways:

• improve upon an existing angle – e.g., “write a good blog post as fast as a professional typist”
• add personal stories – all personal experience is unique
• add your opinion – while it shouldn’t be all about your opinion, your readers follow you because they value what you think
• combine two topics – e.g., What Einstein Taught Me About Death

Whichever you choose, find a way to present an original angle. The simplest, although not most comprehensive, way to double-check you’ve found a unique angle is to simply search for your headline in quotations. You have a unique angle if you can’t find any other results.

5. “What’s the best way to present my point?”

Throughout history, authors have expressed themselves through many different forms:

• poetry
• song
• plays
• books
• journals
• stone tablets…

Each form has its own advantages and disadvantages as a means of expressing a message. Some are more entertaining than others, while others are more informative. Some are great for long messages, and others are great for short ones.

When it comes to a blog post, you have a variety of formats to incorporate into your post:

• text
• images/gifs
• video
• infographics
• audio
• embedded social media (tweets, slideshows, etc.)
• formatting (bullets, bold, font size, etc.)

They each have a specific purpose, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Text

Almost all blogs are built on text. It’s by far the simplest, fastest, and cheapest way to convey a message. But it’s also often not very effective at getting messages across. Reading takes a lot of time, and people can process images up to 60,000 times faster than words.

Images

You can’t create a blog post with just standalone images, but they can be used to enhance your content. Images can quickly convey data in a clear way or provide simple instructions that would otherwise require complex text descriptions. There are many types of images you can use in your posts: charts, screenshots, animations, and more.

Sites, such as Buzzfeed, often base entire articles on images or gifs illustrating their points:

Video

Some things need to be learned visually, and images may not be enough to help with that. If you’re giving an overview of a tool, it can take several images to show what you need to show. In contrast, a video that’s 30 seconds to 2 minutes long can often show the features in an easier-to-understand way.

Infographics

If you know me at all, you know I love infographics. Not only do infographics generate more shares than regular posts, they also allow you to quickly highlight the most important aspects of a topic.

As a bonus, it’s very easy to write a post about a topic and then create an infographic with the key takeaways that can be used for another post.

Audio

Podcasting has exploded in the past few years. There were over 1 billion podcast episode downloads in 2014. But that doesn’t mean you need to create a traditional podcast if your readers like audio. On some posts on the Crazy Egg blog, we embed a short “podcast” that summarizes the content in the article. Anyone who doesn’t like to read can listen instead.

Interactive content

Interactive content is still fairly underutilized, but it’s a great way to get readers to engage with your blog post. If you can find a way to get a reader to take action on something you mention, it can help illustrate a point you’re trying to make.

Quizzes and calculators help readers learn and apply something immediately. For example, SilkRoad built a truly ugly calculator for their homepage to show prospects how much money they could save on their hiring and training procedures.

Formatting

Decide which points are most important and need to be emphasized. Format the post so that these are the biggest and bolded on the page. In addition, you can (and should) use formatting to make your article more readable to lower your bounce rate.

Overall, you can prove your point in many ways. Think about which ones you can create and which ones will get your message across more effectively. Don’t be afraid to combine them if you believe it will be most effective.

6. “Does any research need to be done ahead of time?”

The reason that most marketers “get away” with not having a content schedule is because most of the time, they can write a post last minute.

I still don’t think that’s a good idea for a number of reasons, but aside from that, you can’t always write at the last minute.

This means you’ll either have to publish a subpar post (useless) or postpone posting altogether, which can have consequences of its own.

The reason why you can’t always write a post at the last minute is because some of them require work before you even start writing.

Most posts don’t require too much work. I typically spend about an hour researching my topic and finding useful statistics that support my points.

But not all research is like that.

If you need to interview someone, especially someone busy, it can take weeks to schedule a time when you’re both available.

If you need to collect specific data for a post, such as the results of a split test, that also can take weeks or months. For example, Bryan Harris split-tested the effects of removing his sidebar on VideoFruit. He couldn’t have done that overnight.

What if you need to analyze that data? That can take even longer. For example, HubSpot, among other companies, frequently publishes massive reports of benchmarks. The team needs to spend weeks or months collecting the data and finding important trends that can be presented as statistics.

Ideally, you should ask this question when you first come up with the post idea. At the very least, ask it before you start writing so that you can complete all background work as soon as possible.

7. “Is my deadline reasonable?”

Before you start writing, you should always have a deadline—and a reasonable one at that.

If your deadline is too short, you’ll end up rushing the post and producing mediocre content. We all know how that goes: less traffic, less engagement, and fewer subscribers.

But having a deadline that’s too long isn’t good either.

Work fills the time allotted for it; that’s Parkinson’s law. Extra time gives you an excuse to slack off.

So what you really need is a reasonable deadline.

This means that this particular question has to be asked before you even start writing. It needs to be asked when you’re planning your content schedule.

Don’t have a content schedule? Make one. That’s the only way you’ll be able to produce great posts on a regular basis. It allows you to have a little buffer room in case a post takes longer than expected.

8. “Can I go the extra mile?”

To really stand out in the flood of content online, you need to write exceptional content.

Amazing content has to be many things:

• interesting
• useful
• actionable
• fun to read

Creating a great blog post is more like crafting a piece of art than simply producing a manual on how to solve a problem.

There are many ways to go the extra mile, but I’d like to highlight a few of my favorites.

a) Custom images

As discussed before, images can help you highlight and reinforce concepts. On top of that, they can be entertaining. Some blogs regularly use comics and images to illustrate key points:

b) Spreadsheets

If you’re writing a blog post that advocates using a spreadsheet to solve a problem, give your readers a sample or template. This will increase the chances of them taking action. You can even use this as a content upgrade.

c) Checklists

If you write a step-by-step guide, what’s more useful than a checklist? Create a simple checklist, and let your readers download it. Again, they will be more likely to use it and to associate any positive result that comes from its use with you.

d) Back up claims

When I write, I try to back up all statements with credible references. It’s the main principle of writing data-driven posts. References help readers trust you and your posts more than a simple opinion.

9. “How does this lead into my next post?”

At some point during the planning, writing, or editing process, ask yourself this question.

When you consider your next post, you have the opportunity to create cliffhangers. Make a note somewhere in the post about a related topic that you’ll be covering shortly in the future.

Additionally, knowing what you’ll be posting about next is extremely important if you’re about to launch a product. You need to write your post while keeping in mind what role it will play in your launch. It may be a case study, an educational post, or a post that highlights a chronic pain.

During the launch, you’ll email your subscribers a mixture of content and information about your product. It often makes sense to include links to recent blog posts to support your case studies or to educate subscribers—but only if you’ve planned relevant posts.

10. “How will I promote this post?”

Just like it’s a good idea to plan your content in advance, it’s also a good idea to plan your promotion.

Not all forms of content promotion need to be considered during the writing of your blog post, but some do.

One of my favorite tactics is to simply email everyone I mention in a post, letting them know that I enjoyed their particular post and that I linked to it in my article. Most of them will be happy to read it and share it with their audiences if they liked my post.

Before you publish your post, carefully go through it to see if you missed any opportunity to mention someone’s work.

Note that while you could mention someone for the sake of getting a bit of extra traffic, I do recommend linking only to posts and resources that add value to your post.

11. “Will I repurpose this post?”

Repurposing content is one of the best ways to bring down the cost of each individual piece of content you produce.

If you have a limited budget, this is how you can consistently publish high quality posts.

If you ask yourself this question before you start writing, it will make your life a lot easier.

How?

Imagine if you’re writing a blog post and also plan to turn it into an infographic. Instead of having to pull out all your stats and main points later, you can put them into a secondary text file as you’re writing the post.

In addition, you can paste the URLs that you’ll put at the bottom as your sources in that document instead of going through your blog post later to get them one by one.

12. “What do I want readers to do after reading this?”

Blogs can have many purposes, but each blog post should help you accomplish each one.

Let’s hope that by the end of a blog post, you’ve imparted some wisdom to your readers or discussed an important problem or topic.

There are two things you should include at the end of each post.

First, while you may think it’s obvious what your readers should do next, it usually isn’t that obvious to them.

You need to spell it out. Tell them exactly what they should do with the information in the post.

Secondly, include some sort of call to action (CTA). At this point, they’ve taken the time to read your whole post, so they obviously found it useful. This is your chance to ask for a small “payment” for the post.

Common CTAs include asking your readers to comment by answering a question (my favorite), asking them to share on social media, or asking them to sign up to your list.

You might find that one type of CTA is more important to your business than another, so focus on that, and mix in the others when appropriate.

13. “How will I measure success?”

One of the hardest things about blogging for a business is tracking the results.

Not all posts are created equal. Some take weeks to write, others take hours. Some have custom images, some don’t. And almost all posts address different topics, which makes them hard to compare.

While we generally look to see whether we increased the number of backlinks, comments, or shares over a long period of time, these metrics aren’t very useful when determining if a single post is successful or not.

But we also know that the vast majority of engagement or results come within the first week or two of publishing a post. That gives us a time frame we can use to evaluate the results of each post individually.

Before you write the post, and while you are editing the post, ask yourself how you will measure its success.

Some posts are made to generate links and social shares, e.g., roundup posts.

Others are made to generate discussion, e.g., my earlier example of my $100,000 per month challenge introduction.

Yet others are written to build relationships with influencers. A post can give you a reason to reach out and give them something of value.

You should regularly review the results of your past posts. The idea isn’t to deem each one a failure or success but to learn what does and doesn’t work for your business and your audience.

Conclusion

Nothing in this article is particularly complicated to apply—that’s the point.

These are simple questions you should ask yourself through your content creation process to make sure you don’t forget anything important.

I’ve put together a basic checklist you can print out and keep at your desk if you’d like: download it here.

I’ve said it before: consistency leads to success. Get in the habit of answering these questions for every post, and you will produce better content on a regular basis.

Now I have a question for you, which I’d like you to answer by leaving a comment below.

Which of the questions in this article is most important for your blog?