A Freelancer’s Guide for Writing Powerful Blog Posts Fast

Image by Tima Miroshnichenko

Freelance writing is fun. But it’s agonizing to churn out a five-star blog post for every client’s project if you lack an efficient, repeatable process.

Many writers spend excessively long hours figuring out how to write the best blog post for their clients. They fumble on the internet for so long before coming up with a good enough piece of work.

Sometimes they have to beg the client for an extension. But by the time they’re done, they’re stressed, exhausted, and uncertain if the work will make the cut. And the struggle repeats on the next project.

I’ve been there.

But it doesn’t have to be that way for you. You can write a high-quality blog post every time, in record time, with an effective formula.

And that’s what we’ll be discussing today — top tips for creating a quality blog post fast, every time. These are tips premium content agencies like Codeless and experts such as Smartblogger writers recommend.

We’ll talk in-depth about each step after which you can grab a copy of the template to help you apply the tips easily. Keep in mind that I’ve used mental health writing niche examples but you can apply these tips to any niche.

Let’s dive in!

1. Research and Create a Clear Outline

In this first step, you come up with ideas for your piece, build up your points — show how you’d expound and prove them, and how you’d conclude them.

Outlining helps you organize your thoughts, include all the essential parts, and discard the not-so-important “by the ways.” It also helps you create a fast draft since you’d be simply filling in the details after doing most of your research — Neil Patel uses outlines to create articles in under 60 minutes; it’s just crazy (But of course, this works with a topic you’re super familiar with and have practiced writing many times).

You can also send your client the outline so they can approve it beforehand instead of writing the whole article only to be told they needed a different angle — the worst, right? And the best part is, it’s one of the world’s best strategies for improving your writing skills.

Moreover, freewriting, which is contrary to outlining, doesn’t work for the mental health and addiction recovery niches because they’re research-backed and need an arrangement of facts.

However, you don’t need to be a robot while using an outline. It’s merely a tool to keep you on track. You can still enjoy your creative flow as you use your outline.

So here are the steps to creating a time-saving, quality outline.

Step 1: Quickly Find the Search Intent

Image by Andrea Piacquadio

To understand the search/user intent of the keyword you’re dealing with, you have to ask yourself, “What are readers looking for?” This way, you discover the needs of your readers and their solutions.

Tools to use when checking search intent include Google SERPs (free), Answer The Public (Three free searches per day), and paid SEO tools such as Frase, and Surfer SEO.

Google’s SERPs include “People also ask” and “related searches,” which provide valuable information to help you deliver quality content to readers.

1. Search what ‌readers are looking for. Use the “related searches” and “people also ask” sections as well.
2. Search for semantic keywords (words and phrases connected to your keyword) and include keyword-relevant concepts, words, and topics you need to include in your post.
3. List out at least five of the top-ranking posts on SERPs and evaluate their content.
4. Take relevant ideas from ‌top-ranking ‌competitors, observing how they’ve answered the readers’ questions.
5. State what you’ll include in your post to make it the best blog post ever published on the topic (improve on the top-ranking posts).

Finding your keyword’s search intent opens up a whole stream of opportunities to be able to tackle their concerns. Now that you have outlined what your readers need, it’s time to come up with a befitting headline.

Step 2: Come Up With the Most Attention-Grabbing Headline

One mistake you want to avoid is writing the blog post before crafting a headline. Many writers make this mistake and wonder why their blog posts seem all over the place.

But not you.

Based on the keyword and other directions provided by your client, plus checking the search intent, you know what your readers need most. Now choose a title that clearly and powerfully conveys you as the best person to come to for their solution.

Here are headline tips to keep in mind to become a professional headline generator:

Image by Gerd Altmann

• Touch on what’s keeping them up at night. You can know your client’s audience while reading their about page or blog posts. Are they desperately looking for ideas to get their loved one to rehab? Are they searching for mental health tips to keep their sanity in their 9-5 job? Use vocabulary that’d just hit home on their challenge, such as: “Proven Psychology Techniques to Convince Loved Ones to Seek Rehab” or “How to Stay Sane No Matter How Crazy Your 9-5 Job Is.”
• Take inspiration from professionals. You can also transform your competitors’ best headlines into unique, powerful headlines with your own words.
• Make your headline short and punchy. The general rule for well-performing headlines is 60 characters, but you can use the Google SERP Optimization tool to check how your headline looks on Google even when you’ve fit in more characters (the character width can allow more than 60).

Additional Tip: To become an expert in crafting headlines, practice writing at least five headline variations before choosing one or more (title and meta-title). You can use these headline writing ideas or the Semruch headline generator to come up with brilliant headlines quickly.

Step 3: Craft an Introduction That Lures Your Readers Further

Writing is the art of engaging your reader to the end. And the introduction is your next stage to arrest your readers’ attention to check your meticulously crafted article.

The Nielsen Norman Group discovered that people spend around 57% of their time on a web page viewing the content that’s visible before they scroll. That usually involves an intro and sometimes, a bit of the upper body section. So if your intro doesn’t engage them enough to stick around, they’ll hop onto the next search result.

Thankfully, you can come up with engaging intros even as a beginner.

The four easiest introduction formulas to help you write powerful intros include:

• PAS: The problem-agitation-solution formula is exactly what it sounds like. You start by declaring a problem your reader faces. Then you poke at the problem further and make it sound like the most terrible place to be. But you don’t stop there. You hint at your solution(s), stirring up a craving for the rest of your advice. PAS is one popular and effective copywriting technique that works best for most topics, especially the mental health and addiction recovery niche.

Image adapted from Grow Therapy

• Comprehensive: Now this one involves the PAS formula and then you summarize the points you’re going to give them in short, punchy words, or a bullet list.
• Anecdotal: If you’re writing for a client who ‌doesn’t mind or even tells you to ‌use personal stories in their work, you can use anecdotes relevant to your topic to draw the reader in.

Additional Tip: You can use a relevant stat or mini-story to capture your readers at the intro. For example, if you’re talking about mental health among adolescents, you can agitate the problem with a statistic like, “World Health Organization reports that 14% of 10-19-year-old adolescents around the world are suffering from mental health illnesses.” I use this tactic a lot. Like in this article on the Ria Health site.

Image by Author

Step 4: Break Down Ideas in Your Body Section

To draft faster and stay value-focused, you need to organize the main ideas (the main topics you stated in the research section). You do this in the H2s and H3s in the best order and include the core ideas you’ll talk about under them.

Follow these steps to ensure a smooth experience, just like sliding down a kid’s slide.

1. Have your H2s listed out.
2. Introduce your point. Here’s where definitions and facts surrounding your point would go.
3. State why it’s important. Why should the reader care about this point?
4. Include at least two most recent research and statistics from authoritative sources (government websites, sites owned by psychologists and psychiatrists, or authoritative coaches) to support your point. You can use the filter tool on Google to find out research from the past year or years before.
5. Find at least one real-life story from your client’s site or a non-competing site to back up your point further.
6. Illustrate how the reader can put into practice what you’re advising them on and/or recommend a resource or tool.
7. Employ H3s and H4s to break down your main ideas where relevant.
8. Use short bullet lists to make the content more engaging and digestible.

As much as you can, make sure you include such details in your posts. Of course, it doesn’t need to be in this particular order. You can apply this rich subsection format according to your specific situation. Remember, this is the outline phase, so you’re merely including statements and links, not writing the entire thing.

Step 5: Craft an Awe-Inspiring Conclusion

By the time you’re done putting in the necessary details, you can state the points you’re planning to wind up your post with.

Image by Ketut Subiyanto

Choose the conclusion framework you’d go with. You can:

• Summarize: Keeping in mind how you introduced your reader, put your post’s arguments in a few words.
• Give an actionable tip: What should the reader do to put the ideas you’ve stated into practice?
• Give a call to action: Which next step should they take? Should they contact the addiction recovery center, comment, or send in their questions?

Use either of these frameworks or summarize and then include a call to action or an actionable tip. Conclusions ought to be motivational, catapulting the reader to take a step that demonstrates the impact of reading your post.

Additional Tip: Make sure you won’t be putting any new information here that you haven’t included in the article.

Step 6: Assign Word Count for Each Section

Many writers struggle with sticking to the word count of the client. But it doesn’t have to be so. You can nail it every time and still deliver a powerful, engaging post.

How? By assigning word count to each section of your post. This also keeps you in check so that you can have consistent sections, especially if you’re dealing with a list post.

Again, don’t stay rigid. A few extra words here and there, which you can cut during editing are okay. Remember, this outlining procedure simply keeps you on track and as productive as possible.

Step 7: Insert Images

Visuals like images help engage the reader more and make your content more memorable. In fact, 49% of bloggers in a recent content marketing study reported better results because they use visuals more (7-10 visuals per post to be exact).

Image by Teona Swift

If your client is okay with it, put non-stock images from sites such as Pixabay, Pexels, and Unsplash after every 300 words (it makes up to 7 images for 2000 words). They, of course, need to be relevant to the content and the exact subsection you’re putting them in.

Most clients include Google-friendly image rules, so it’s important to follow them to the last detail as you do other content rules. You can change some of the images during editing so you can choose to not compress, edit, or design them yet.

Step 8: Revise and Edit Your Outline Quickly

Here you’re going to polish your outline because as you know, a smooth outline equals faster and more quality drafting.

You need to quickly check your outline for:

1. Context. Make sure the outline represents the answers to the user’s intent in the context targeted by the client.
2. Flow. Ensure your outline fits the heading you’ve given the article and includes the necessary details systematically.
3. Headings: Make sure your outline headings are clear and power-packed
4. Word count: Check if your word count adds up
5. Stats: Confirm if you have research and stats to back up your points.
6. Images: Check if you have supporting images and if they’re reasonably spaced.
7. Arrangement: Make sure you have a unique headline/content arrangement from other articles on the same topic

Once you confirm that your outline is clear, contains all the main points you’ll fill in, and has all the supporting details to create a professional outline, jump into drafting.

But before you learn how to draft productively, grab your Time-Saving Blog Post outline template. You can make a copy of your own, which allows you to use it every time you write.

Image by Author

2. Draft Your Quality Blog Post Quickly

Given a smooth outline, drafting is much easier than outlining.

Here you fill in your ideas in the sections and the stats following the essential elements you want in your blog post in no time. Stick to the most relevant details the reader should know and express ideas in the strongest way possible.

Maintain Flow From One Idea to the Next

For your entire article to be engaging enough to effortlessly ‌carry your reader from the introduction to the conclusion, you need to be conscious of the flow.

Ensure flow not only between sentences in paragraphs but also from paragraph to paragraph, from paragraph to the next sub-heading, from that subheading to its first sentence, and so on and so on. You get the idea – flow everywhere.

Having flow isn’t rocket science as many think, though.

You can use transition words and phrases like “therefore,” “however,” “the problem is,” “the solution is simple,” and many others. You have to check out the SmartBlogger rich resource I just linked to and you’ll start flowing like a pro.

Another way is to avoid inserting ideas in the middle which don’t fit with the rest. Ensure that as you get into another statement, the previous one easily connects to it.

Translate Great Ideas into Your Own Words

In this writing journey, we learn to express ourselves more expertly from professionals. Even, they learned from those before them. So don’t shy away from taking inspiration from competitors and the like.

As you take inspiration from other excellent pieces (and even suggestions from tools like Writer), make sure you’re speaking of them in your own style. With time, you develop your unique voice, which clients love, and their readers also.

Ignore Distracting Information at All Costs

Image by Jonas Svidras

Even after shutting off distractions like social media, your family around you, and calls, you can lose focus on ‌main points during drafting. You might find yourself trying to find out too many details that don’t add up much to the main idea.

The truth is, you don’t need to write every detail on the topic, just what’s most important for the user’s intent. So don’t dig through piles of information to get a small by-the-way tip just because you want the article to look shiny — You get the point.

Keep the End in Mind

Drafting involves guiding your readers through knowledge to help them make more informed decisions moving forward. You need to keep the end in mind for you to flow towards that destination seamlessly.

And remember, you already introduced the end in the intro and established it in the conclusion.

Write a “Good Enough” First Draft Fast

You know what? Even the best writers on this planet produce chaotic first drafts. They’re not as glamorous as many think. Many award-winning writers admit to writing messy drafts.

What do you ignore, though?

While drafting, don’t bother much about punctuation, grammar, spelling, or other technical issues you can work on during editing. Just keep on your creative flow and craft a flow of thought that answers your reader’s questions. Keep the rest of the technicalities for the next step, editing.

3. Self-Edit Like a Pro

Although paid versions of tools like Grammarly, Writer, and ProWritingAid help a ton when self-editing, you need to use key editing strategies professional editors use to polish your draft.

Image by Brooke Cagle

Step 1: Check for Consistency in Your Subheadings

Consistency in your headings’ format and length influences how professional your article looks.

If the title of your blog post is “Ways of Getting Rid of Depression at Home” and then one of your subheadings says “Sleeping for at Least 7 Hours” instead of “Sleep at Least 7 Hours,” your article will lack proper formatting and flow.

In a nutshell:

• If your title is in action format, the subheaders should be in action format;
• If it’s about steps, let the subheaders show you’re going step by step (numbering would also show this);
• If it’s strategies, you can state the title of strategies such as “The Pomodoro Technique;”

My title is in action format and as you can see, my subheadings, whether H2 or H3, take on the same.

If your headings are not consistent, the post appears roughly arranged, demeaning all the good stuff you’ve got in the article. I remember at some point I made these mistakes and the client thought me sloppy and my work, “too hard to edit.” They paused me from working with them, and so I don’t want you to learn the hard way about these things I’ve learned about through the “school of hard knocks.”

Another obvious thing, is making sure you have your headings formatted correctly from H1, H2, H3…

Last but not least, keep your headings as brief and of consistent length as possible.

Step 2: Read Your Post ‌for Context

Does your article connect the idea in the title and introduction to the rest of the body and conclusion? Does it address the user’s intent in the angle you intended it to?

Ask yourself these questions and eradicate everything that doesn’t fit the content.

Step 3: Mercilessly Cut Flabby Words and Sentences

Image by Vlada Karpovich

Flabby words and sentences are made up of unnecessary, weak phrases that destroy the flow. Instead, you need clear, punchy phrases that drive home a point and still engage a reader.

Here’s an illustration:

“Detoxification is important. You need it if you’re going to survive during recovery.” Detoxification helps you transition safely during recovery.

“When you’re depressed, you can become unproductive.” Depression can cause unproductivity.

You can check your sentences to cut the fluff and reconstruct clearer, more powerful sentences. With time, you get better at it. Tools like Writer also come in handy for this. Also check out these amazing editing tips to start creating powerful final drafts.

Step 4: Insert Power-Packed Words

Power words are persuasive phrases copywriters use to grab the attention of their readers and persuade them to do something. Most engaging posts are packed with power words.

See how Gary Gorisko used power words to glue you on the page in this subheads article.

“Ok, so no actual guns or tanks are involved, but you are indeed in a bloody battle for the eyes and minds of your readers.

The blogosphere is a huge, congested, noisy space where everyone is jockeying for position and fighting to get noticed.”

They grab your attention because they’re exactly that, power words.

Step 5: Optimize for SEO

No matter how good your post is, if you don’t work in some SEO strategies, the readers you intended to read it might not see it. Why? It’s hidden. So basically you’ve made something good and threw it in the middle of hundreds of other items. How in the world can it get noticed?

A good freelance writer for the web needs to know basic SEO. Often, mental health and addiction recovery clients provide an SEO strategy you can apply using tools such as SurferSEO, Frase, and others.

Photo by Pixabay

You need to not only do SEO that the client tells you but also work in the basics of SEO for a client that hasn’t told you, if they’re okay with it. It makes you more valuable and therefore, a highly sought-after writer

Step 6: Edit Grammar

With stinky grammar, even the best content can be thrown into the trash. That’s why even if you weren’t a grammar geek like me, you have to practice to become one.

SmartBlogger’s grammar guide will help you get the basics straightened out and as you practice good grammar, and use tools such as Grammarly, Writer, and Prowriting Aid, you get better at it.

Step 7: Reread and Edit for Flow

If you follow these tips, your article would probably be one of the best on the web on the topic but don’t send it off yet. Reread the whole piece to check for any broken flow remaining.

Edit, read again, and send.

Additional Tip: Take Productive Writing Tips Seriously

To keep improving your writing quality and write blog posts faster, you need to keep the following general writing tips in mind.

Focus on the Task in Your Writing Time

I assume you have specific hours set to write because that comes first. Doing so helps you flow in your topic (resulting in a better quality of your article), helps you churn out content faster, have happier clients, earn more money, and have more time to do other meaningful activities.

If your time is already set, switch off the distractions and just write.

Image by George Milton

I used to think I was a sluggish writer because I often spent 3 days doing what could be done in 3 hours. However, over time, I realized I was labeling my time wrongly and was thus not getting the right strategies to change the bad habit. I discovered that I actually spent only an hour of what I’d set as 3 hours to write. The rest of the time I spent distracted doing other things.

So I started disciplining myself to sit in that chair as long as it was time to write and do nothing else until break time. And I was able to fulfill my tasks faster in the time I had set.

Insert Break Time

Breaks enhance productivity. That’s why you need some short breaks of 10-15 minutes to grab a coffee, take a breath of fresh air, dance — whatever feels like a break to you.

Practice Fast Typing

If your typing speed is 100wpm, this is not for you. But if less than that, it’s one of the things stalling you.

As soon as you can and as often as you can fit in typing lessons, practice. You’ll find plenty of free lessons online.

Schedule Practice Time

Remember, writing is the way to get better and faster at writing — as long as you’re using the right writing tips.

Create some time, perhaps three days a week, where you put these tips to work, writing quality samples and guest posts to boost your portfolio while getting better at writing quality articles fast.

Time to Create Brilliant Blog Posts Fast

Writing using a quality, repeatable researching, outlining, drafting, and editing process helps you churn out projects in no time.

With this guide and productive blog post template, it can take you around 6 -12 hours to write a 2000-word article if you’re a beginner, but as you continue using this simple quick blog post-writing process, you can start creating even more quality articles in less time.

The quality and speed of your writing might be at any level now, depending on your expertise, familiarity with the topic, the needs of your client, and other issues, but one thing is for sure —- as long as you use this reliable, repeatable process, you can improve tremendously in your writing.

When you do, come back and comment on your experience to motivate other writers to do the same!