How To Write a Quality Blog Post Every Single Day

A step-by-step guide to becoming a prolific writer

You may not always have access to this kind of inspiring workspace. But even without it, you can pull this off. Photo by Arnel Hasanovic on Unsplash

Being a prolific writer seems like the holy grail of blogging and content marketing industries. While putting out blockbuster content less often can be a valid strategy, it seems that to build online presence ASAP, being prolific is the most straightforward way. Many successful writers talk about the value of publishing one blog post per day.

But how can you put out decent quality writing daily? I used to believe it was impossible — until I did it. Having the experience of publishing daily for 30 days straight completely changed my perspective.

I’m pretty sure you could be writing one quality blog post every day, too. However, you may need to redefine what you understand by a “quality blog post” first. Further, you’ll also need a framework to make daily publishing sustainable in the long run.

That’s why I want to share my insights and experience with you. And remember: This comes from a person who thought daily publishing was out of her reach — until she did it.

Like most challenges in life, you have to tackle this one by adjusting your mindset first.

The Mindset That Allows You to Write a Quality Post Every Day

Let’s get this out of the way first: You need to identify why you even want to write a blog post every day. Doing this will be a challenge and one that’s hard to pull off if you don’t know the reason behind it.

Being a prolific writer has many potential advantages, from exponentially improving your skills to giving your site more exposure. It’s up to you to identify your most important why. This why, however, isn’t about uncovering your deepest “sense of purpose.” It’s much more pragmatic than that.

Simply ask yourself: What is the outcome I’m hoping to achieve by writing daily? Is this about ranking better on Google? Collecting more leads? Getting better at writing? Boosting my views and earnings on Medium?

Once you answer this, it’s time to sort out the link between quality and quantity in writing. The common worry that stops writers from being more prolific is that with increased publishing frequency, their quality will inevitably drop.

I used to believe that too. The main reason was that I confused the quality of writing for the amount of research, level of detail, and length of my posts.

By writing daily for 30 days straight, I realized that the number of scientific references or links to other writers’ work I crammed into articles wasn’t synonymous with the quality of my writing.

Today, I define good writing by things like clarity, eloquence, simplicity, and avoiding redundancies. These are developed through the number of complete posts I write, much more than through the amount of research or time spent on each post.

I’ve come to believe that being prolific increases the quality of my writing more than almost anything else. I think this is a helpful belief if you want to publish daily and with decent quality.

Once you accept that more writing leads to better writing, publishing daily posts makes a lot of sense. The next step is defining what kind of posts you’ll be writing, so it’s both realistic and beneficial to sustain this daily system in the long run.

Designing a Framework to Make Daily Writing As Easy As Possible

Daily writing with quality will be a challenge, especially if you’ve never done it before. With that in mind, you can (and should) make it a manageable kind of challenge that you can sustain for longer than just a few days.

According to Karl Rhonke’s theory of three zones, the key to designing a beneficial challenge is leaping beyond your comfort zone, but to a reasonable extent. Just outside the comfort, you experience the stretch zone. According to Rhonke, this is the perfect place to be if you want to learn from a challenge.

However, if you push yourself too hard, you enter the third, panic zone. Once you’re there, your experience becomes overwhelming and you tune into survival mode. This is not how you make a challenge beneficial.

If you want daily blogging to become a long-term thing, you need to keep balancing at the edge of your comfort and stretch zones, without entering the panic one. To achieve such balance, it helps to decide on some aspects of your writing to create a framework in which you can sustain it.

Start by defining your areas of expertise and interests that will fuel your posts. This means you need to pinpoint the aspects of your life that make your perspective as a writer unique.

Take some time to enlist your experiences, knowledge, and aspirations that separate you from the crowd. What have you lived through that most people haven’t? What problems keep you awake at night? What do you have a lot to say about? To get more detailed advice on this, read the excellent guide Shaunta Grimes wrote on creating your editorial plan.

When you know what value you can offer, get practical on how you’ll fit a daily blog post with your other commitments. For that, answer the following questions:

• How many words (roughly) will your daily post be?
• How much time will you need to create it at the very least?
• What’s the maximum amount of time you can afford to spend on it?
• Where will you publish it? Is it just one platform or more?
• How will you promote your posts and how much time will it take?
• What’s the timeframe in which you’re planning to write and publish daily?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a better idea of what you’re signing up for. Make sure that what you commit to is realistic. According to the self-development writer Steve Pavlina, setting yourself up before you start a challenge like that accounts for 80% of the success.

Then, it’s all about executing the plan.

How To Make It Happen Daily: A Step-by-Step Process

Now that you’ve set yourself up for daily blogging, it’s time to do the work. There’s a good chance it’ll be easier than you thought because you’ve made your daily writing commitment more tangible and realistic.

So how do you translate it into practice? Here’s a step-by-step process to make it as frictionless as possible.

Step 1: Decide on the headlines

I find it helpful to pick my headlines beforehand. I try to create a batch of them for the week ahead, to make sure I don’t run out of ideas to write about.

It’s not that I ever do. Usually, new ideas pop up as I go through the week. It often happens that I write about those rather than the ones I had on my preconceived list. However, knowing that I have a solid plan I can refer to gives me the confidence that, whatever happens, I’m covered in terms of topics.

Step 2: Pump yourself up before writing

Before I sit down to write my daily post, I have a specific routine that sets the creative process in motion. Having proven ways to put myself in the mood to write is what I rely on these days.

The key point of my routine is going for a 30-minute walk in the park with uplifting music in my headphones. That’s what I do just before I write. 95% of the time, it brings me to the exact mental state I want to be in when I start creating.

You could see it as “producing inspiration on demand.” If you can find an activity that does that for you, the daily writing process is going to be much easier.

Step 3: Pick the headline

For a very long time, I made this mistake: I wrote my headlines after I finished my posts. This made my pieces go all over the place because I had no specific goal in writing them.

That’s why I strongly encourage you to settle on a headline before you start writing. It can be a headline from the list you created for the week or one that came to you a minute ago.

Remember that to pick a headline is different than to pick a topic. By picking a headline, I mean actually writing down how the title of your post will read.

As you come up with your headline, make sure it contains an incentive for the reader to click it. Bloggers often call this the promise. Some of the most powerful promises you can make are:

• to inform
• to show an alternative view on something
• to justify a behaviour/belief
• to entertain
• to inspire
• to motivate

Once you have a headline with an enticing promise, it’s time to deliver on this promise. That is, write your actual post.

Step 4: Outline your post

This step is super important if you want to deliver value. Knowing what you’re going to say before you start writing can make all the difference. To know what you’re going to say, you need an outline.

First, it makes the process easier for you as the creator. When you have the main points listed in bullets, writing the post means simply going through them and expressing your thoughts in an elegant and compelling way. This allows you to focus on the fun stuff and enjoy writing more.

Second, working with an outline increases your post’s comprehensiveness to the reader. Because there was a plan in your writing right from the beginning, it will translate to the clarity of the final product.

Step 5: Write about what you know

This is the critical moment: Writing the first draft of your post. If you picked a clear, enticing headline and outlined your post beforehand, this shouldn’t be too hard either.

The one thing I need to remind myself about when writing daily is to talk about what I know. Too often, I’m tempted to engage in a deep exploration of a topic and get lost in researching it. I love to combine the process of writing and learning simply because it feels like an exciting adventure.

However, if you want to publish daily, this is not very sustainable. You have limited time to write each post. This means you should, for the most part, stick to the outline you created and write based on what you already know.

My rule of thumb is to create ~80% of the post based on what I knew before I started writing it. Only a small chunk of the content comes from complimentary research. If I’m learning and writing at the same time, one post per day is just not going to happen.

Step 6: Put placeholders not to interrupt your flow

As you write your first draft, don’t stop to check facts, synonyms, or search for quotes. If you’re missing an additional example or a resource, simply mark it in the text and keep moving forward.

Your priority is to finish your first draft, preferably in one sitting. It doesn’t matter how many holes it contains. It’s more productive to fill in those holes later on, as a separate editing task.

Step 7: Edit, format, and publish

It may seem weird that this final step contains three different items. But, compared to all the work you’ve done so far, they’re so straightforward you can almost treat them as one step.

Once you have the first draft of the post, you’ve done the hardest part. You have the bones of your post and all that’s left to do is to cover them with proper meat and skin.

It’ll still take you a bit of time and you shouldn’t rush it. However, from this point on, you’re working on an existing product, not creating it from scratch. Your final checklist is this:

• Filling in the holes, i.e. replacing placeholders with quotes, references, and additional examples.
• Editing for flow and clarity. (Does it keep the reader engaged and ensure they understand all your main points?)
• Editing for grammar and brevity. (Can you say the same thing in fewer words?)
• Formatting for a smooth reading experience.
• Publishing and promoting your post.

You Won’t Publish Daily Forever — But It’s a Good Place to Start

OK, wow. You’ve just done it. You’ve read through all the steps that will allow you to do what you once thought was impossible. You now have all the knowledge and evidence to believe you’re perfectly capable of writing a quality blog post every single day.

As you go ahead and implement this, keep in mind that this isn’t something you’re going to follow for the rest of your life. It’s merely a starting point. A framework that allows you to kick off a daily writing habit.

Even if you stick to it most of the time, you probably won’t stick to it all the time. Sometimes, you’ll skip a day. Sometimes, you’ll write a shitty post. Sometimes, you’ll create a fine piece of writing that’ll be completely out of alignment with your goals.

This is not only perfectly OK. It’s a necessary part of the learning process. As you try to follow this framework and fail at it, you’ll develop your own ways of tackling the challenge of one blog post per day.

With time, you may decide to write more than once per day. Or you may decide that the once-per-month blockbuster approach is closer to what you need. The better of a writer you become, the more agency you’ll have over your writing schedule.

But to get to that point, you first need to start. And the best place to start is usually right where you are.