Define your easiest article

The easiest article is a great tool for work. Basically you need to specify the amount of words that you can write about the given subject in five-seven minutes without thinking too much or searching for additional info. For me it is 150-250 words. Later you can use this easiest article amount of words to split some large articles into smaller ones. It will help you.

Split the articles

This hint works for large articles, but can be used in any case. If you have a 1000 words article, you can write a 100 words intro and split the rest of the article into three or more parts (the mentioned easiest articles or even smaller ones). From this moment you will have three 300 words articles or five 180 words articles and they will be much easier to write.

Add some extra info

You can always cover a part of the article with additional extra info. For example if the article is about auto insurance, you can add a small part about auto insurance in general. Such additional information blocks are a great solution if you lack few hundreds of words to finish the article. Of course this works only if the client is ok with such info.

Start with the facts

If you don’t know how to start the article, start with the middle facts part. For example if it is a description of a product you can write the specifications of the product color, length, general market info. At some point you will see that you already have 150-200 words and you got some additional ideas while you were writing the facts.

Write parts

If you have a large number of articles to write, you need to start writing as soon as possible. Create all the empty documents, do some information search and start writing. As soon as you run out of inspiration for one of the articles, switch to the next one. Eventually you will end up with all the articles 20-60% done. At that point it will be very easy to finish such almost done articles. You’ve got to be careful with large amounts of articles, if you get stuck with one article you can easily spend too much time and miss the deadline. So it is better to start writing small parts of all articles.

Concentration

This works basically for every type of work. You need to concentrate to get the job done. Turn off the messenger, turn of the music (or turn on the one that you like), if it is possible even turn off the Internet. When you are left alone with your articles, you will be able to do the double of your usual work. I manage to do up to 12 articles per such offline day and only 4-5 per a day with dozens of things distracting me. Of course it is not easy to work 10-12 article days in a row, but I recommend mixing easy days with hard working days.

There is one thing that most of the beginner writers don’t want to accept — more work, less creativity! You need to be creative only if you are asked to. 99% (okay maybe 90%) of the buyers actually don’t need imagination. If you need to write a large number of articles most probably the ideas will be borrowed from other websites. The buyer sees something he likes and he needs to get a similar article for his website. So there is no need to bother with inventing something new. The facts will always be the same: this law is specified in this part of the Criminal Code, this car has this air conditioning installed and this hotel is rated with five stars. Everything you need is to spice up the existing document and facts. Before you start writing an article it is better to search the web for some similar articles. This will help you with choosing the style for your article and definitely help you with some additional ideas. Your best friend in most of the cases will be Wikipedia. Usually my articles consist of 40-70% original article + 20-50% Wikipedia facts and related ideas + 10% of my own ideas and thoughts about the subject. The result — an article where buyer sees the facts, something he liked in the previous article and most important some new thoughts. Of course this strategy helps not in every case, but it works for any large project. And… oh yeah this article is completely original.

Another common problem is the level of English. The best solution is to write simple. A large part of the web comes from non-English speaking countries, so it is best to focus on some plain and understandable English if possible. Try to avoid some complex sentence structures and if there is a choice between a simple word and a specific term choose the simple word. Of course it doesn’t mean that you need to write in monkey English.

As for the large projects, there is a thing that beginners usually don’t believe in: it is actually very hard to write big amounts of articles. So if you are negotiating a big project don’t be a hero and promise to finish everything in one day, better take some more time. I manage to write not more than 8-10 500 word articles (this article is a 500 word one) per day and this is very hard. It is hard to maintain a good writing tempo; it is hard to generate new ideas and thoughts starting from like article number six; it is hard to avoid mistakes when you are tired. If you can write a 500 word article in 30 minutes, it doesn’t mean that you will be able to handle 10 articles in 5 hours. It will most probably take like 10-12 hours with breaks. So in every case it is always better to split large projects into smaller parts.