Evergreen | Website In A Weekend

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

July 23, 2009 By Dave Doolin

(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:

Tim Berners-Lee practices Publish, then Polish

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:

Check for spelling, grammar, typos as mentioned above.
Check for hooks referencing future articles that are now published, add links to these articles as necessary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Add a “call to action,” or change an existing call to action if it’s irrelevant or out of date.
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!

Updated May 24, 2011: Added TBL image.

Developing Your Website’s Editorial Policy

(Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes)

If you want to publish a lot of articles on your blog, you need an editorial policy to:

Develop guidelines for how articles are published
Develop guidelines for when articles may be modified, including reasons for the modification: fixing errors, rewriting for clarity, adding notes to an ongoing conversation with the reader, etc.
Establish revision control policy to keep track of changes.
Show these editorial policy and publication guidelines to your readers.

We’re going to take a look at these aspects of publishing in more depth shortly, but first, let’s back up and examine where your blog stands in the publishing universe.

What does “publication” mean anyway?

The meaning of the words “publishing” and “publication” are changing.

Before the internet, a publications such as books, magazines or newspapers took on a final, canonical form once they rolled off the printing press. These days, documents that live electronically on the internet, such as the articles on Website In A Weekend, can be infinitely replicated for fractions of a penny each, and propagated anywhere in the world in an instant.

In the real world, changing a document is expensive, requiring more paper, and the old paper doesn’t go away. In cyberspace, the source document, perhaps this article, could be extensively modified on a regular basis, and few humans would know about it. Automated tools such as search engines can store the revisions they find when they crawl the site, but who looks back through the cached copies? Given that the nature of electronic publication seems so much different, does having clear guidelines really matter?

Publication guidelines matter

Having guidelines for publishing articles on blogs matters as much as having guidelines for printing on paper.

But for a different reason.

In paper publishing, the cost is in the printing and distribution. Controlling these costs requires evaluating the potential return on the writing. For web delivery, the cost is in the author’s time… and the reader’s time. You need a solid set of guidelines for publishing on your own blog so that your readers can instantly understand the value they derive from spending their time reading your writing.

How you publish articles

I use the word article because I don’t make a sharp distinction between “posts” and “pages.” Both are articles, each with different characteristics. What’s more interesting to me are these other characteristics, which influence how I publish articles. In some cases, posts may turn into pages, posts may be removed, or modified to limit readership according various permissions or to published in a different form such as a downloadable PDF.

The key is to publish according to your purpose. If you want to make money publishing, you can’t give away all of your words. That’s a contradiction in terms.

Modifying: updating and editing

As you write more and more articles, you will find that you will want to change at least some articles. Some of the reasons may include:

Material that goes out of date should be deleted or the reader otherwise alerted to it’s expiration.
Correcting factually incorrect material
Continuing a conversation with the reader at a future date. RSS example
Correcting poor grammar or diction, other wordsmithing chores. Some might say this is not allowed. I don’t really care because I have a tendency to write “telegraphically,” with apparent non-sequiturs making perfect sense to me while confusing readers. I have no compunction against honing such articles when rewording or reorganizing increases the article’s readability.
Modifying post structure to provide a teaser, requiring the reader to “turn the page” (click through) to read the entire article. If you’re going to use teasers, it’s better to write them into the article from the beginning, but it usually isn’t that difficult to “retrofit” a teaser onto a published article.

Establishing revision control

WordPress has the capability to save all of your draft versions and all versions for each time you edit after publication. For long posts developed over a long period of time, this puts quite a burden on your database, as WordPress saves the entire revision, and not just the differences between revisions. You can turn off revisions completely, but then you run the risk of accidentally destroying an article if you make an ill-advised cut and paste, then navigate away from your page without saving it.

That sounds stupid, but at least one person reading this article has had the cat or the dog walk across the keyboard at least once. These things happen.

Watch for a future post detailing your options for revision control, which will recommend installing a revision control plugin to set a certain limit on your revision history (Website In A Weekend keeps 5 revisions at this time).

In the meantime, if you’re just starting out, allow saving revisions and plan to dig deeper in the future.

Showing guidelines to readers

On the one hand, readers should feel comfortable they are getting honest, accurate information, and telling readers explicitly what, when, why and how your editorial policy operates should engender trust. For example, one interesting concept I learned this morning from a marketing newsletter is that author’s notion of “evergreen” content. Evergreen content doesn’t expire; it retains it’s validity over time and space. On Website In A Weekend, articles on creating pillar or flagship content are evergreen (although embedded links may expire and need to be replaced or removed). In this case, such content could be tagged as “Evergreen,” allowing the reader yet another perspective on your body of work.

On the other hand, there is always some noisy person who takes unction at the drop of a hat. That is, tell people you modify an article, if you have enough readers someone is going to take offense.

When this post was published, I did not find (via web search) much relevant material on editorial policy for websites. In one notable exception, Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture has an explicit statement on his editorial policy. In his words, if you don’t like what he writes, “Get your own damned blog.” That’s pretty good advice!

The beauty, power and elegance of evolving conversations

When you make changes in the articles, should those changes be shown to the reader directly? Good question. My rule of thumb is: only when it doesn’t interrupt the narrative. If it adds to the conversation, by all means, annotate your article. Changing and modifying is part and parcel of the web… the web’s inventor, Tim Berners Lee designed the web specifically as a read-write system.

Remember, in the end it’s your content. You have the freedom and control do with it whatever you choose… just as readers have the freedom choice whether to read or not.

Update: Here’s an Jeff Jarvis discussing “Product versus process journalism.” The adversaries are bloggers on the one hand, and the New York Times on the other! How does it go? First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.