I know what you’re probably thinking, “another clickbait blog post.” I would probably think the same thing if someone claimed that they can not only help me write blog posts fast but write a 2,000 word post in 20 minutes. However, in the realm of academic writing, there are platforms that claim to assist you when you think, “who can do my essay for me in a crunch?” It’s surprising, but such services do exist.For those of you who are new to blogging and may not understand how long a 2000 word post usually takes, ask any experienced blogger and they will say it can take upwards of four hours. In fact, Zen Post says, that a high-quality 2,000 word post should take at least six hours to write.
For those of you who write 500-1,000 word articles and don’t know why anyone would want to kill themselves with a 2,000 word post, let me explain. The reason why bloggers choose to write such long posts is because studies have shown that Google likes long-form content.
Why Does Google Like Long-Form Content
The reason they like longer content is the longer your content the more likely you are to answer someones question. When someone types into Google, “how to run faster” Google wants to show them the best possible answer to that question. So if they had to choose between showing “The 7 ways to run faster” or “The 24 ways to run faster” they will probably show the 24 ways over the 7 ways.
What do you know. In order of position, the highest list post is the 24 ways, then 23 ways, then at the bottom 7 ways. Another reason why longer blog posts do better than shorter ones is because Google analyzes how long visitors stay on a web page before leaving.
The reasoning is the longer someone stays, the more likely the content is valuable. If someone leaves quickly, it’s probably because the information isn’t what they are looking for. So Google likes to show blog posts on the first page that people click on and stay on.
Okay, enough of that. Now you know why bloggers choose to write longer content. Now, to address what you are reading this post for, “How do I write at a rate of 100 words a minute?” I’ll get to it I promise, but first, you need to understand how I even figured this out in the first place.
Why I Needed To Write Blog Posts Faster
There was a point with my blog in which I had over 10 writers writing for me. They wrote one blog post every other week leading to about 5 posts a week. This helped our blog put out a steady flow of content for the summer of 2020.
The issue that arose was a lot of the writers we had were college students. As the school year was approaching, some of them informed me that they weren’t going to be able to keep contributing to the blog as academic work would get in the way.
I also wanted to start putting longer-form content on the blog but felt bad asking the writers to write 2000 word blog posts for me. Since all of them were doing this to add to their portfolio, this was an unpaid position. To ask someone to spend hours writing thousands of words for no pay didn’t sit well.
So, at the end of the summer of 2020, I decided to stop the contributor program leaving just me and my co-founder to pick up content production. At this point, I still wanted to produce at least five pieces of content week, each of them being at least two thousand words.
This was a hefty task as I still had to manage all my other responsibilities like backlink building, networking, and social media production.
I was unsure of a lot of things, but one thing I had no clue how I was going to do was write blog posts faster. I’m not a slow writer, but at the time, I was writing at a pace of around 60 words a minute.
That means, in order to write a 2000 word post, It would take me at least 45 minutes, assuming I never took a break or paused. I knew I wanted to cut down that time in half, and after doing some research I found a way how.
The Secret To Writing Blog Posts Faster: Stop Typing
When I was a kid I remember coming to a frustrating conclusion. I loved to write more than I loved to read. However, it didn’t take me long to realize that I could read much faster than I could write. I hated that I could read a good story in a fraction of the time it took for me to create one. That comes to no surprise to anybody. We can all talk and read at a much quicker pace than we can type.
It also is no surprise that in 20 minutes you could have an amazing YouTube video that dives deep into a topic, but if you had to write about that topic, you would need at least double or triple that time to go just as in-depth.
This got me thinking. I knew there were talk-to-text programs like Nuance, but whenever I spoke to anybody about them it seemed like they were always buggy or cost too much money.
However, I did some research and realized that Google Docs actually has a talk-to-text feature. I decided to give it a try and see how much more productive I can be if I were to dictate my blog posts rather than write them. The results were nothing short of phenomenal.
It now isn’t uncommon for me to average a rate of 100 to 150 words per minute. This is crazy, seeing that the average professional typist only averages around 65 to 75 words per minute. This allows me to pump out around three to four thousand words a day for my blog, in the same amount of time it would take me the pump out 1500 to 2000 words a day if I were to type.
Below I outline the four steps you need to take to blog faster if you want to blog faster by dictating your blog posts.
Step 1: Do Your Research
The very first thing you’re going to want to do is do your research. If you’re going to write a blog post about best places to travel in Thailand, you want to know exactly the places you want to reference, and anything else you want to bring up through the post. This is very similar to what you would do if you were typing your post as well.
The more research you can do before you start dictating, the more organized you can be when you go on to create your outline. I recommend looking at around three to five of the blog posts that already show up on the first page of Google and see how they format their posts.
Is there a place that all of them are mentioning? Is there a place that none of them are mentioning that you could add to your blog post? What are some similar questions people are commonly asking? What do I mean by that?
If you do a Google search you can see that when you type in “best places to travel in Thailand,” Google shows that people also ask, “What is the best part of Thailand,” “Is Thailand safe right now” and more.
If you know that people are asking questions like these, you should have a place for them in your blog post. Once you’ve done your research and you know exactly what you want to write about it’s time to create your outline.
Step 2: Create Your Outline
This is the most important thing you’re going to have to do when using the talk-to-text feature. Without a solid outline you can find yourself just rambling. That is the only downside to using the talk-to-text feature. When you’re typing you don’t ramble as much because you don’t normally type in filler words such as “like” and “um.”
If you’re going to use the talk-to-text feature, it’ll pick up everything you say. So if you commonly use filler words, it’ll add those as if it’s part of your blog post.
By creating an outline it will help you streamline you’re content. What I like to do is make all of my H2 headers before starting my blog post. If you don’t know what an H2 header is, just look at this blog post. All the title sections that say Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, and Key Takeaways are what’s called H2 headers.
Now, let’s say I wanted to write a 2000 word blog post. For this post, I want to talk about five distinct topics within the post. That means I would have five H2 headers. By having all the H2 headers already written down, it goes from a 2000 word blog post to five 400-word blog posts.
This strategy of chunking your blog post into smaller pieces makes the writing process much easier. Also, by having the topics you’re going to write about already written down, you know exactly what goes into each section. This helps you not repeat yourself throughout your post.
Step 3: Start Talking
To get the talk-to-text feature you will first need to open up Google Docs. From there, click on tools in the top menu. After that scroll down to where you see “Voice Typing” as an option. Click on “Voice Typing” and a microphone will show up on the top left of your screen. Once you click that, Google Docs will start listening to you and translating your speech to text.
When using the talk-to-text feature the key here is to be slow and enunciate. Usually, when people start saying things like um, it’s because they’re talking too quickly. Even if you slow down, you will still be talking much faster than if you were to be typing. It also makes editing much easier if you slow down your speech.
One thing to keep in mind is that it doesn’t know when to put in punctuation. So, you will have to say things like comma, period, and new paragraph whenever you want them. While that might be awkward at first, you get used to it quickly.
Step 4: Edit
Once you finish your blog post, you’re going to have edit your mistakes. These mistakes will look much different than if you typed your post. You’re going to have to edit out all the filler words that you use. Also, the talk-to-text feature isn’t great at deciphering homonyms.
If you say “allowed” it may think you mean “aloud.” It can even think you said, “out loud.” To show you what the talk to text looks like in application, I took a screenshot of how my talk to text turned out when I pretended to create an intro for this post. I also took a screen shot of a typing speed test that I took for comparison. You can see the results below.
In one minute for the speed typing test, I got 58 words with a 96% accuracy. By just sacrificing 1% of accuracy, I was able to produce 100 more words in the same minute. I even made it harder trying to make the intro make sense.
In the typing test, I didn’t have to make sense I just had to type random words. If I had just talked randomly for one minute I bet I would’ve been closer to 200 words.
One thing to keep in mind is I’ve been doing this for a while. So, dictating has become very simple for me. You probably won’t start at 150+ words a minute but it’s something to work up to.
Also, you can see the highlighted parts that I got wrong when I used the talk to text feature. They put down “riding block both” instead of “writing blog posts”, “it’s” instead of “is,” and some other minor mistakes. But seeing that I am creating content at three times the speed it is more than worth it.
Key Takeaways
While creating the blog post will take you longer than 20 minutes, just getting to 2000 words shouldn’t. All the steps I outlined in this post you should take regardless if you dictate your posts or write them. The only major difference you’ll see is your edits is that certain words will have been mispronounced.
Once you get good at this, the process to write a 2000 word blog post should only take an hour. The research should take you 15 minutes, the outline should 10 minutes, and the editing no more than 15 minutes. In total, that comes out to about an hour.
Now, can you see how powerful this strategy is? Remember, the average blog post of 2000 words is written in 4 to 6 hours. That means you can now do what the average blogger does in just a quarter of the time! This can free up your time to focus on other ways of growing your blog, or by creating more content. It is up to you to decide what’s best for your company.
If you don’t have a blog or looking to monetize a current blog, check out our blog post on How To Create A Blog And Earn Money. We cover everything you need to know in that post as well as links to some valuable resources that can help you along your journey.
Are you a blogger looking to write blog posts fast? In this post we talk about the one strategy that no one talks about.