How To Implement “Publish, then polish” For Fast Blog Posts

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

Rapid content creation is art and craft.

If you’re used to taking your time creating long, detailed, high quality articles, learning the art of rapid content creation is good for you, and you should do it. It will put you out of your comfort zone, and that’s a good thing. Here’s the key point: You do NOT have to sacrifice very much quality! What you do… is understand the nature of the quality you are creating.

Just as writing quality articles becomes easier with practice, writing quantity articles becomes easier too. Not only that, with practice, first drafts more and more start to resemble final drafts.

I use an easy-to-learn process called “publish, then polish” for rapid content creation here on Website In A Weekend. This concept is not new. In fact, being able to rapidly update published material was the fundamental point of the web. It was why the web was written. Don’t take my word for it, other people think similarly:

Publish, then polish is a strategy well-suited for rapidly creating a large volume of high quality content for a website. The publish then polish strategy is especially useful when your goal is a well-maintained website consisting of a large amount of “evergreen content,” blog posts and pages that are intended to stand the test of time.

The strategy doesn’t require any less work—there are no shortcuts to quality content! However, you get more articles with less time, and it does strike a balance between search engine longevity weighting, and article quality. That is, search engines care more about how long your article has been in the index rather than how your article benefits readers.

I view publish, then polish as a three stage process: 1. pre-publication, 2. publication, and 3. post-publication. Let’s take a look at each stage.

Pre-publication

The first stage in the publish then polish is: Write the best first draft you can… but write it as quickly as you can.

Sometimes this is not possible. At the moment, I have 15 articles in my Drafts queue that are little more than bullet points and notes. This is ok too. But I also have 14 articles scheduled, and another 10 in rough draft.

Get your draft good enough. Write your draft article such that it’s “good enough” for publication. The article must be coherent. The article must be good enough to stand as an article in it’s own right.

Feel free to introduce hooks for future extensions of the same article. For example, I’ll reference a future blog post by title or subject, and alert the reader with “[upcoming article].”

Now schedule it for publication at a definite time and date.

Every day before publication, take a look at it. Fix typos, spelling, grammar. Elaborate on vague points. Be more specific when necessary. Add example, personal observations, affiliate links, internal and external links. In short, continue to add value and benefits for the reader to the material.

Publication

Right before the article is scheduled to be published, make a final check for accuracy and completeness. Use the Website In A Weekend “How to Really Publish a Blog Post” checklist to make sure you don’t miss anything. This includes ensuring that image descriptions are correct, SEO title, description and keywords are specified, the correct category is chosen, etc.

Post publication

What you do after publication should be listed out in your editorial policy, which informs readers what to expect concerning updating your content. And updating is important, even – especially – for evergreen content. There always seems to be a typo or misspelling that you missed. Or a paragraph that you recall being crystal clear when you wrote it, but now seems murky as midnight and requires revision. Let people know that you are checking and revising articles as necessary.

Here’s a list of post-publication activities to consider:

1. Check for spelling, grammar, typos as mentioned above.
2. Check for hooks referencing future articles that are now published, add links to these articles as necessary.
3. If you’re writing for the long term (evergreen content), you can introduce more material, even more hooks for future extensions of the same article or links to articles in queue.
4. Check for consistent emphasis and typographic style. For example, if you have a habit of using bold font for the initial sentence in a bulleted list, make sure all your bulleted lists in the article are written accordingly.
5. Rewrite for “you-centered” copy as necessary. Readers want to feel included, as part of the conversation. As writers, we often fall-back into narcissistic “Me-centered” writing: “I did this. I felt that.” Instead, describe your readers so they feel included.
6. Shorten unnecessarily long sentences, use shorter words instead of longer words, change passive voice to active voice, rewrite for conversational tone when necessary and change negative language into positive language.
7. Rewrite the first and second paragraphs to support subtitles and teaser copy. Even if your article is as dry and dusty as The Great Sahara Desert, you should still inject some excitement into the leading paragraphs. Get your readers positively excited about being dry and dusty. You can reuse these subtitles and teasers later. Think of them as stepping stones bringing your readers closer.
8. Add a “call to action,” or change an existing call to action if it’s irrelevant or out of date.
9. Add, remove or change a hidden offer. Hidden offers are a little like Easter eggs. Once you find something people want, they are more inclined to hunt for them.

Can you think of more? First comment adding to this list get 30 minutes free phone coaching! (Offer expires August 31 2009).

Evolving strategy

Once you have momentum on your blog, where you are getting a reasonable number of search requests, and you have commenters, discussion, and you’re building a community, you can change your strategy to support more relevant goals.

For example, the current strategy on Website In A Weekend is for rapidly creating “pillar content.” The general wisdom on pillar content is to write 5-7 articles establishing you as an authority in your niche. Website In A Weekend’s goal is 101 articles of pillar content! Once this 101 article goal is reached, each article in the 101 series will be revisited at regular intervals, then reposted as “Featured Content.” The main focus of Website In A Weekend will then be on building community.

In a future article, I’ll discuss leveraging updated content using links in newsletters, and how to alert your RSS-only readers about updated content… without updating your feed!

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Updated May 24, 2011: Added TBL image.