How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour

If you're trying to build an audience based on pithy advice in a well-known space, there are a lot of posts like this that apply. Focus your ideas, write about one thing, make it relatable, bold a couple random words, and Bam! Traffic!

If you're writing about something technical, complex, or sophisticated, it's worth spending more time to get it write. If you're writing for developers, include code and make sure it runs. If you're writing about hard topics, find research to back up your conclusions and build a real narrative (Priceonomics does this well).

Especially as a founder, your goal should be to write the definitive piece on whatever your topic is. As somebody starting a company on that topic, you are legitimately one of the foremost experts on this topic, so people want to hear your thoughts! Keep all those other rules in mind, buy don't sell yourself short by writing half-hearted pieces that sort of rehash the same topics.

For example, where I work, we think that traffic management (routing, proxies, service mesh, all that rot) is a better way to do things if you've gone to microservices. One example is releasing software. So we wrote one article on it (in two parts). It's long, it's technical, and it has been so, so successful. We don't try to reinvent the wheel on this topic. We just point people to this post.

https://blog.turbinelabs.io/deploy-not-equal-release-part-on...

Consider the content of this post:

1. research

2. draft

3. edit

...revolutionary. Maybe there's a reason why Baremetrics writers aren't in the New Yorker ;)

Again, the article has generally good advice, but there's no secrets here to make someone a master blogger. It's going to require the same thought, hustle, and persistence as anything else.

This should read "It _varies_ industry to industry"

The whole point of the article is kinda moot if the reader finds these small errors like these

>>> Can tell you the reading level of your content (aim for 8th grade or lower)

Fun fact: This blog entry has grade 4 (Good)

It's been forever since I blogged, but when I did I always had that block in the back of my mind that I shouldn't publish unless it was well thought out/well written/reviewed into the ground.

But this is a twitter world. People don't spend any time reading and they don't care to retain most material. If you blog, the most important thing is having a regular schedule. People won't come back for one well written article a month. But they'll read regularly if you produce content twice a day even if they aren't particularly interested in half of what you write.

I don't think the ROI value really exists for blogging unless it's an investment in name recognition for an individual in a niche market. It's too much effort for too little reward.

All of these "Lessons from the Greats" have been floating around for a few generations at this point, and they are utter garbage as general writing advice. Twain, Hemingway, Strunk & White all ignore this advice in their own writing. And they do it for very good reasons: it makes for shitty, boring writing with zero personality.

Some domains of writing require this, of course. It's not bad advice for Garner to preach these things in his Legal Writing and Editing books and courses because in legal contexts (briefs, contracts, laws) you don't want interesting writing. You want the clearest, most unambiguous writing possible. Same goes for pure journalism. The writer's voice should be absent and the facts put on display as simply as possible. Academic papers and textbooks should also follow this advice.

But writing a blog post you want other people to read is exactly the place where all of that goes out the window. If the author of this post had spend more than 12 minutes researching good writing advice, he might have noticed the hundreds of writing experts who rail against this kind of guidance all the time. He might also have noticed that every single one of these things like active voice, avoiding adverbs, etc. goes against the only two pieces of good advice he wrote: write what you want to read and write in your own voice.

These specific prohibitions are in the same class of shit advice that shit writing teachers give to shit writing students to get a not-shit grade in a shit writing class. Don't begin a sentence with a conjunction. And don't end a sentence with a preposition. And don't use passive voice. (Most of the people who still troll with this kind critique can't even identify passive voice in non-trivial constructions.) Don't split infinitives. And don't use big words. And on. And on. And on.

Of course people can overuse these patterns. Many people do. Maybe I just did. But telling people to avoid them in general because they can be overused is absurd. It's also lazy. It's a lot easier to tell someone to write according to a safe formula than it is to sit down and analyze why something feels overused and help the writer understand what can be better about it.

Quality writing for a blog post needs personality. Minding these "Lessons" removes that.

Here's my advice for writing a quality blog post in 1 hour:

1. Don't. It doesn't work. 2. Don't assume you're an expert on a topic simply because you started a business related to it. You probably aren't. 3. Don't assume that 12 minutes of research makes you an expert on anything. 4. Don't refer to yourself as a founder or talk about how founders do things differently than other people do. Founders aren't special. 5. Don't be afraid to write above 8th grade reading comprehension.

6. Do write things you want to read. 7. Do write in your own voice. 8. Do use adverbs, colorful phrases, made up words, and flavoring elements that put your unique voice and personality into your written text. 9. Do give me a reason to read your blog post on a topic (Trust me, there are thousands of others. You're not the first.) instead of some other blog, a Wikipedia article, an academic journal article, or some other source of information. 10. Do be kind to yourself when you're writing; be an asshole when editing.