Sometimes, it appears as though I’ve been writing a post for hours on end. You’ve probably felt this way, especially if you write professionally all day. It is only natural to think this, and then think whether your visitors will sincerely be able to “give back” in terms of the time that was put into writing the content.

“Time Disappears” by travism

Some blogs certainly take a much longer time than others to write. For some blog authors and owners, it may be more than a day (twenty-four or more hours) before they can finish a post. Typically, these posts are more than two thousands words, even reaching further into this threshold. Other people may write less than three hundred words in a day (taking anywhere from five minutes to an hour) and are able to generate the same return as those who write thousands of words every day.

The Return Factor

When you write, you write to get a return for your work. You should be able to get a return greater than or somewhat equal to the return of someone who holds a “traditional” job. However, if you aren’t paid by the hour, you have to assume that there are eight hours in a day or work off a weekly/monthly pay schedule. This way, you can directly compare your pay rate to other professions.

Placing more time and emphasis into your work, you will be able to reacher higher plateaus much more quickly than those who spend less time, but produce more content. However, it all depends on your niche and the visitor group that you are targeting.

For example, a news site that publishes twenty articles per day of less than three hundred characters won’t be able to build trust nearly as quickly as a site that publishes one, 2,000+ word post each day that is complete from a reference standpoint.

What I am getting at is that as you grow your site, you have to take into account the research and time factor put into each post. If something isn’t working for you, your blog, or your readers, change what you are doing to make it work.

Value-Based Content

Even though you may place more time into a certain type of post – especially those with images and graphics that you have to find or create yourself – these posts are going to add value more than anything else to your site. Although the post may not become popular initially, it will be able to eventually drive thousands, if not a million or more visitors to your site as your site grows.

Looking down the road, if you are able to be the first person to write a post about a topic, you will be revered as the authority, with others recommending the content through social media and various networks. This traffic will equate to better rankings in search engines (more links pointing to individual posts and keywords), and this will equate to more revenue.

Finding what provides value shouldn’t be too hard, as most blogs that are in wider niches have areas that haven’t been covered too frequently. For example, if I write a post covering “Ten Ways to Better Integrate New Tool in Your Blog,” there will most likely be a number of other blogs that link to it, finding it useful. This is especially true if other major blogs pick up the story.

Quickly Completing Posts

Whenever I write, I try to complete a post with as little grammatical errors and with as much information as possible. This should be done in as little time as possible, as an unpublished post won’t get you anywhere. Sure, spending half as much time on editing it will certainly help, but won’t be the cure for driving new traffic to your site – not everyone is concerned about “perfect” content. They simply want the content, any way they can get it.

Your challenge is to discover a method of creating a high-quality piece of content in a relatively short period of time – in most cases, under four hours. If four hours of time spent writing a post can drive ten thousand visitors to your site over the course of a week, I’d view that as extremely positive, especially for smaller blogs. As you grow, you’ll need posts that take eight or more hours to write to drive more than a hundred thousand visitors in the period after you write it to see a good return.

These figures are rather standard. You should be basing them off your rate of earnings versus traffic. With blogs, it can be difficult, as one visitor can purchase advertising space which is a 100% return ratio.

Conclusion

Depending on your niche, amount of traffic, and community that you’ve built around your blog, you will need to write content based on this. “Average” posts shouldn’t take too much more than an hour to write and revise, while longer posts can take a series of days to write.

No standard has been created for how long it should take. If you are a faster typer and have all the ideas for the content, it’ll dramatically reduce the time it takes to write. On the other hand, someone who has to research and draft a post may spend four times or more writing the same pice of content.