Wow, this is article 500!! 🎉
I wish I could say I did an article a day, like Seth Godin or Flavio Copes. However, I did miss writing on my wedding days and had zero regrets about that 🥳.
I did write 500 tech-related articles already...
Can you believe it? That means we went into lockdown about 500 days ago (How time flies, right?).
This article contains the five most important things I've learned from writing 500 articles.
1. Plan your content and life
It might look simple on paper, write some words every day, but the struggle is real. It can be a mental drain at times, so the best thing you can do is plan around your content and life.
You might get the part about content. Every time you have an idea write it down in Notion. This way, you should never run out of ideas.
A second side to doing such a crazy challenge is your personal life.
Every single day ~ Yes, every single day, you have to write content. That means holidays, weekends, days you don't feel like it. And it can not just be hard on yourself, but on your partner, friends and family as well.
The main thing I learned is to keep them informed. When going on a holiday, I try to do some work in advance to enjoy some time off.
My wife is luckily super supportive and lets me do my blog on the weekend. However, some days we need to communicate when I'm writing and when we do something fun.
2. You don't need to write perfect content
Before we dive into this point, let me tell you a bit about my motives for writing:
- Keep up to date with tech
- Imprint techniques in my brain
- Improve my English writing
- Improve my technical writing
- Learn in public
As we take these points, you can see my goals are far from your other blog goals like: Get x million views, or Sell x amount of ads.
I write for myself to become better, and with that comes a side effect that people are intrigued by my way of learning and want to learn with me.
I have days where people reach out and say I made a mistake. This can be anything from typos to having the wrong Codepen linked to the article.
I appreciate people telling me these things. It's yet another way of learning. I always thank these people and change that part of the article.
If you are that person who is procrastinating putting out their first article, run it through Grammarly, read it once more yourself and GO! Put that content out there.
3. Write for your best readers
As you may have seen above, I'm a big fan of writing for myself and like-minded people.
I know from myself that I like small bite-sized articles. I don't read super long articles as they don't get to the point quickly enough for my liking.
My writing style reflects my reading style in that sense. It's small, to-the-point articles that solve problems quickly.
And I know that's why a lot of people like reading my articles.
Moral of the story: Write content you would read, as you know best, to write it like that.
4. Motivate yourself
You can't write 500... let's even make that 30 articles consecutive when you're not motivated.
If you don't enjoy writing and it's a struggle, don't do it. For me writing down my ideas and learnings is such a liberating feeling. This, in turn, motivates me to write more.
There are days where my brain is overflowing with the idea after idea. I open up my Notion and write down all of those ideas.
When the next writing session comes, I often read the headlines I wrote down and immediately get re-motivated by my enthusiasm when coming up with the ideas.
5. Enjoy what you're doing
With motivating comes enjoyment. Like I said before: If you don't like writing, don't do it.
This doesn't mean you can't put out content, but maybe you like making videos more? Or just publishing ebooks?
Do whatever makes you happy as a person.
And don't worry about sucking at it first, pretty sure we all do in the beginning.
Find your passion and use that to put out content people (and you) love.
Recap
If you are keen to put out a lot of content, keep in mind it's not easy. There's a lot of planning around it, not just in content but also in your life in general.
Don't be afraid that you have to be perfect, nobody is!
Write for your best readers, which are people like-minded often. That said, it comes down to writing content you would read yourself.
And lastly, enjoy the process!
Thank you for reading, and let's connect!
Thank you for reading my blog. Feel free to subscribe to my email newsletter and connect on Facebook or Twitter
Top comments (23)
Hello Chris,
These are words of gold! I really admire your consistency and your unbelievably fantastic streak makes me want to strive for consistency.
Thanks again for writing this.
Thanks Bala!
Appreciate you taking the time to comment this, and glad it inspires you
Thanks a lot for these key points. Right now, I am not doing any type of content writing and essay writing. College-paper.org reviews is a company that is handling my all projects that are related to essay writing and content writing.
Hello, chris
I am Hasaankhattak from Pakistan and open dev app and on the front of 2nd article is your the one I am really on.
I love reading tech articles and I am computer science student. I read you article such amazing this js the first article which I like too much it's make me to response you.
Have a Good day. Always be happy sir
Thankyou
Hi Hasaan! thank you for reading my articles with such joy.
Appreciate you!
Keep up the learning and let me hear from you again 👋
Well, massive respect for this, 500 posts is an epic milestone.
Earned a very rare follow from me just for that, I am now off to explore some of your stuff!
Is the plan to continue or are you considering backing the pace off a bit as the world ramps back up to normal?
❤🦄 - amazing!
Wow thanks for the follow! That's amazing ❤️
The plan is to continue actually, I have some plans to turn my day job back a couple hours (4-8) so I get some more time to refactor some older blogs.
Since I struggle to maintain 500 (growing) blogs with new links/content/refactors.
Congrats on your 500 milestone! I really like your short and focused writing style, this works well for me as well. I like to digest a lot of content in short periods. My brain starts to wander quickly. I am about a month in on my latest stint of daily posting. It comes and goes for me based on family, work, and motivation. This time around, I have done a better job at pplanning ahead, and it is working better.
Curious, how many finished posts ahead do you get?
Yeah seeing a lot of your tmux articles coming well done Waylon!
As for how far I go: 7 days at the moment, planning ahead for my travel back, where i'll miss 2 days (unless I write in the plane, which I generally don't do).
Your comment sparks my point about writing for your readers, as I read in the same fashion.
I can't digest large lump sum stories very well, so I also only read super short articles most of the time.
I like your point about getting motivated. Writing 500 articles is a huge challenge.
Thanks Waqar,
And it definitely is a huge challenge.
Motivating yourself is a must ✨
Thanks for sharing! Agree on the content plan. I moved from blogging whatever I came to my mind to having a schedule of related posts. It made me feel less stressed about what to write next
Hi Cesar, yeah the stress is a real thing.
I've felt this before where I was such a asshole to people around me because I was stressed about writing articles for the next day.
Coming up with the planning and writing in advance helped a lot with that.
Congrats on 500 articles, Chris!
Thanks Braydon! ❤️
Wow impressive! Congratulations for the milestone Chris 🥳
Thanks David! ❤️
I learned writing short article is better compared waiting for 1 month and pushing a long article. Also, 100% agree with all your statements
Yeah I've never been one for long sentences, even in school I struggles to write the word-quota on essays.
So figured short is just my style 😅