Ever thought about sharing your experiences, knowledge and skills? Or wonder what goes into putting together a weekly blog post, video, or podcast? In the following I’ll share the steps I take to publish my blog, but many of the steps apply to any medium. I hope you will be inspired to share what you have learned and experienced, in your own unique and valuable voice.

Outline

When I decided to commit to a weekly blog post, I started by brainstorming possible topics. In my case I am using The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey as a backbone for the first several posts. My cadence was one post introducing one of the seven habits from the book. The next three posts were on subjects that related to the habit. This gave me an outline of (7 habits x 4 posts/habit) = 28 posts.

Certainly you don’t have to pick a book and organize the posts like I did. However, it is super helpful to have topics ready-to-go because it reduces the stress of figuring out what to write about when it comes to actually sitting down and writing.

Frequency

I post an article every week. When I first started the series I would spend a little time on the article almost every day. Now, I typically write the draft on one day, then review and publish another day. At the start I had people review my article and give me feedback. Today I write and review it myself. Could it be higher quality if I had someone both providing feedback and editing? Yes, I’m certain it would be. For now, though, I am comfortable with the level of “quality” of the articles. However, if I ever write a book there’s no way I’m doing that all by myself 🙂

Freewrite

To start an article I set a timer for 10 minutes and allow myself to freewrite. That phrase comes from the book Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content, by Mark Levy. Essentially I write whatever comes to mind on the topic. I don’t need to worry about grammar or getting exactly the right word. If I get stuck I force myself to write (I might ask what has me stuck about writing on the topic and start writing about that). Sometimes the result is a more refined approach to the topic I’m considering. Other times it’s 90% of the blog post I’ll publish.

Draft

Once I’ve done my freewriting I’ll compose the draft of the article. Here I’ll add the summary (tl;dr) and action steps (engineer your life). I’ll also do an editing pass.

I use Word instead of writing directly in the editor where the article will eventually live. I find it easier to work in Word instead of the visual HTML editor.

Headline

Before I move the work into the HTML editor, I come up with a headline. I generate a list of 30 possible headlines. I got this idea from an interview with Marie Forleo on Amy Porterfield’s podcast. The episode is “#231: ‘I’m Terrible at Writing My Own Copy ‘ and Other Copywriting Lies That Are Killing Your Sales”. To be honest, most of the 30 titles I generate are not very good. However, one idea tends to build on another and I end up with one that resonates. Once in a while the one I choose is in the first 15 I generate, but most often the one I choose is in the second half of titles I generate. I’m pretty sure I’ve never picked the first one I generated.

Paste & Format

Once I have the headline, I copy and paste the text of my article from Word to the online visual HTML editor. Tip: paste as plain text! I still need to fuss with the format a bit after I cut and paste (like getting the headlines correct, breaking the paragraphs into the correct content blocks, and adding in hyperlinks). I save as draft and continue.

Review

I do one more editing pass. At this time I read the article out loud. It’s stunning to me how many errors I find when I read my article out loud. When I read I have a tendency to skip over words, but when I speak the words I can’t skip any. This step really helps.

Schedule for Publication

Once the article is fixed up the way I want it I schedule it for publication.

A few years ago I decided to experiment with sharing some of my experiences and knowledge by writing articles on LinkedIn. At that time hitting the ‘publish’ button was terrifying! I think my first article sat in draft for a couple of weeks before I got up the courage to publish it. I did, however, publish an article, and then another, and with each article I worked my courage muscle. Fast forward to today, and now I can publish an article without a lot of stress (and you can learn to do that too!).

tl;dr

The first step I took when committing to publishing an article every week was to brainstorm possible topics. Then I take 10 minutes to freewrite where I gather ideas. I create a draft and generate a list of possible headlines. Then I paste my text into the visual HTML editor where the article will live. I do some formatting to make sure it looks good, then I read it out loud as part of a final editing step. Last step is to publish the article.

engineer your life

  • Make a list of 10 topics you could write a blog on, record a podcast about, or shoot a video on.
  • Pick one of those topics and write the blog, record an audio file, or capture a video.
  • Challenge: publish the work (LinkedIn might be a good platform if you are just starting out).
  • Remember: you have something of value to share!

Photo by manu schwendener on Unsplash