Hasty articles keep readers away
Respect your written words if you want readers to respect them.
This is the 14 edition of The Essence.
Every time you publish a hastily-written article, you’re risking it.
You are risking losing a potential client who might have hired you if he liked what he was reading.
You are risking losing a loyal fan who might have turned to an online stalker after reading superb articles written by you.
You are risking the potential of having some of your articles picked up by editors and syndicated into dominant media sites.
Michael Simmons, the writer who gets 150,000+ views on average per article, wrote:
“Every time you share content online, you’re training your readers to either ignore you or stop what they’re doing and read you.”
Simmons knew the importance of only publishing good stuff. From the get-go, he spent more than 50 hours per article to produce excellent work. This quality-over-quantity approach took him from a nobody writer to a renowned writer with tens of millions of views.
Now I’m not suggesting you should spend 50 or even 25 hours per article. The idea I’m validating here is to treat every piece you write with respect.
If you don’t proofread or barely edit your articles, you’re not respecting your work.
If you barely research, outline, or prepare before you write, you don’t respect your work enough.
If you don’t take enough time to find solid data and evidence to support your arguments, you don’t respect your work enough.
But more importantly, you’re not respecting readers. You’re not respecting their time, intellect, and attention. And I’d bet they feel it. I’ve read hundreds of articles over the last two years as a writer, examining and judging them. Most of the hasty articles I’ve come across barely got any traction. They usually go unnoticed. They get buried among the millions of blog posts published daily from the 500+ million blogs out there on the wild web.
On the contrary, studying 100+ viral articles, I found that they usually are very well researched, written, edited, and overall well put together.
Steps to stop writing hasty articles:
Give yourself more time to develop each article
When you allow yourself more time, you’ll usually find more evidence, form better arguments, and construct much better articles. Recent statistics curated by Semrush revealed that spending more time on a post pays off. Bloggers who spend six+ hours on a post report strong results by 31%.
Change your mindset
Michael Thompson, a highly-viewed writer, once said:
“I couldn’t just throw up stuff that wasn’t good… If I’m going to write an article on how to be confident, it’s going to be like the best article on the internet.”
By committing to only an article a week, Thompson got great results. Some of his articles were picked up by editors of major sites such as Business Insider.
Instead of writing 3, 5 hasty articles a week—going against the popular wisdom that says new writers should publish a lot—he committed to only one quality article a week. Those high-quality weekly articles racked him over 70K followers on Medium.
Often all it takes is a change in mindset, which later turns to a change in actions, to produce great results.
Change your strategy
Some writers may object and say they’re forced to write hasty articles because they don’t have time.
I would say they just need to change their strategy. Let’s say you have a blog that you publish daily to or three times a week, thinking it’s necessary to grow your blog. How about reducing the number of articles you post to only one per week? Many authors of successful blogs only publish once a week or even less. Brian Dean grew Backlinko into one of the most popular marketing blogs by only posting every four to six weeks!
If you write for clients, how about negotiating writing fewer articles for the same prices?
But is it possible?
If you’re going to make them so much better, more comprehensive, and of much higher quality, sure. Only an ignorant client would want two hasty or mediocre articles instead of one of high quality.
With over 500 million blogs, no wonder why Ali Mese called it the most cluttered marketplace in history. There are also over 100,000 active writers on Medium. More than 70 million blog posts get published each and every month. Hasty articles get lost and buried there. Only the really good stuff, even if not always, stand out.
When I changed my approach, my work started to stand out.
You can do even better.
Until next time,
Mohammed