We’ve all heard the phrase “Content is King,” and there’s a reason for that. As the content of your site becomes more important to your overall search engine ranking, the need to produce quality content increases. However, with the limited resources that small and medium sized businesses have, finding the balance between quality of content and the time taken to produce it is critical.
Here’s a great article to help you hit that desired level of quality before the point where making things better costs more than it returns. Consider this your guide to better blogging more efficiently!
Crafting a blog post is like designing and building a home. Okay, not literally. But there are distinct similarities in the process that I’ll be describing below.
To solve the problems mentioned above, feedback needs to be structured — and the writing process needs to follow the same structure. To help solve our feedback woes, we developed the following three-stage feedback system for blog posts deemed to require significant feedback. Each section corresponds to a certain stage of the writing process — and a complete home renovation:
1. The Outline Stage (30% Completed)
When you’re going for a full home renovation or rebuilding, some of your earliest but most important decisions are going to be designating rooms, deciding what walls to put up or take down, and where wires and plumbing need to go.
This is the outline stage of a blog post, where the structure of the post and its general direction is established. Feedback at this stage is provided in broad strokes, and can modify the entire direction, style or focus of a given post.
2. The Halfway Point (50% Completed)
So you’ve got your rooms defined, and the structural elements of your home are set. Now you’re looking to flesh things out with interior design and making sure your bedroom actually, you know, has a bed.
This is the halfway point, where structure has been fleshed out and significant points developed. Here feedback is less structural, but focused on individual paragraphs in the post.
3. The Final Stage (90% Completed)
Your home is nearly livable, and all it needs now is some personal decor, maybe a lamp here, or adjusting the position of furniture. Needless to say, if you’re only now thinking that maybe the bedroom should’ve been bigger, you’re doing it wrong and revising it would be prohibitively costly.
This is what might normally be considered a first draft, with the blog post largely completed. By this stage structural feedback should already have been provided, and feedback tends to be minor sentence corrections or cosmetic.
