AC Writing Tips: How to Increase Your Content Output

After more than three years of writing for Associated Content, I find that the elements of writing web articles that give me the most trouble now, are the same as they were when I first began. Consequently, I have had to work hard to learn how to overcome the elements of article writing that I find most challenging. It is these elements of writing articles that most affect my ability to increase my content output to the degree that I would like. Trying to master the most problematic challenges when writing articles has not been easy, and although I still struggle with the same issues over and over again, time and experience both have definitely brought me to a point in my writing where I am better able to construct articles more efficiently, which naturally increases my content output. If you find yourself struggling to overcome certain elements of writing articles for Associated Content to such a degree that you have been unable to increase your content output to the level that you desire, consider the following insights and tips.

Do whatever you can to become very skilled and efficient at article introductions - After more than 570 published articles, it's still the introductions that I find most difficult to construct. Do what you can to educate yourself in the proper construction of an introduction. Ideally, your article introductions will explain the main topic of your article, and be followed by a few supporting sentences that reel the reader in, so that they want to continue to read the rest of your article. Becoming as efficient as you can in introduction writing is probably one of the most important things you can do to increase your content output at Associated Content.

Read and learn as much as you can, about anything you can, when not writing - The articles that seem to flow the best, and get written the quickest, are those that are easy to write. And what kinds of articles are easiest to write? Well, articles that are written on topics that you are already extremely familiar with, of course. There are people who are interested in almost any topic you can imagine, so the more topics that you have some familiarity and knowledge about, the more content you'll be able to produce. Most articles take me about half an hour to write (and that's with very little editing, as I rarely make spelling or grammatical errors even in my first drafts). But the articles I love to write the most, are the ones I can kick out in ten minutes. And the only articles I can produce that fast, are articles written on topics that I am very familiar with. So, keep learning about anything you have even the slightest interest in learning about. By doing so, you increase your knowledge base from which to draw. As a result, you will be able to write more articles, more quickly. Thus, increasing your content output.

Get comfortable with a particular type of article construction - For instance, I prefer to write in a formula of: Intro; Point 1; Point 2; Point 3; Conclusion. Sometimes my articles contain more than three main points, but not usually. I find that if I break my article information up into more than three points, they feel to me like articles that a person might lose interest in. Web readers don't typically want to read a 14 page article, and I want readers to actually get something out of what I'm writing. Sticking to a specific article construction formula really helps me to know when to break lots of information up into more than one article, which incidentally also increases my content output.

There are some content producers at Associated Content who roll out an unbelievably high number of pieces of content on a regular basis. Some of them have clearly mastered the skill of combining quality, well-written content with the ability to produce a lot of it, and fast. Others just put out a lot of content, without much of it being very well written. As a writer who is trying to increase your content output, you have to make the decision whether to just knock out a lot of articles, or to try to produce as much solid, quality work as you can. Very few seem to be able to do both, or to do it consistently. Personally, I haven't made it there myself yet; instead, I opt to produce less content in order to maintain a certain degree of integrity in my writing (most of the time).

There's no shame in taking either route; I simply made the choice to do it this way because I am also working on a couple of novels, and if they are published at some point, I don't want my name to ever be associated with any published work that wasn't something I could feel okay about. On the flip side, some content producers at Associated Content simply need to earn a living, and writing is something they can do to make money; they aren't necessarily concerned with the quality of their writing. Regardless of which scenario you identify with most, these writing tips should definitely help you to increase your content output at Associated Content.