It’s the middle of the second week of my two new blogging gigs, and wow am I ever producing content. Well, sort of. I am for the paid gigs. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this disciplined, and I’m learning that for me, it has to be out of necessity.

In fact, now that I recall, I’ve always been able to write best under pressure. Currently, my paid gigs amount to approximately 6 posts overall per day, 5 days a week. Because I have a fair bit of initial research to do, and because I’ve spent extra time getting my posts just right, I haven’t had much time for my own blogs for two weeks. Surprisingly, I’ve had better traffic, clicks and average daily revenue in the 2 wks of July so far than I had in June. July is a supposedly a slower month than June.

Eventually, once I have the hang of these new blogs, I’ll be able to get back up to 10-12 posts per day. But to do so, there are a few things that I have to do, in no particular order:

1. Write my posts in about half the time that I’ve been taking. Why am I taking so long? Because I want them to be just right, so I’ve belaboured over the grammar, like the anal-retentive self-editor that I am. While it’s fine to have a reasonable facsimile of good grammar, I’m not writing a literary novel. There’s no need for the number of rewrites I’ve been doing.
2. Take my own advice and leverage my writing. Some of the topics I’m now writing about have a dearth of content on the Internet. There’s room for more, without being derivative. And I can do so without much extra effort because I’m doing fresh research daily. But to make time, I need to satisfy step (1) above.
3. Change my view point. Right now, I’m blogging about a fairly diverse group of topics for pay. However, when I was (easily ) posting 10-12 articles daily, I was blogging about a different set of topics that I’ve neglected lately. They were relatively easy to do because the content was based on my real experience. I actually didn’t need to do any (or much) research. It’s easy to lose perspective sometimes. In particular, I used to do a lot of recipes and writing about cooking.

Other bloggers have proven that it’s possible to be a professional online writer, and now I’m proving it to myself. The one thing I have to constantly remind myself though, is it takes great discipline. If I watch The Daily Show or Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life - like I’m doing right now for the probably the 30th time - instead of browsing my subscribed RSS feeds, I’m going to suffer for it. And presumably the client.