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How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour

baremetrics.com

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Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour

#5
I know there are efficiency tips here, but the "one hour" thing seems like click bate. For example, it says writing topics should be limited to topics you already know or have been studying recently to limit research time. Well, that seems like something that requires prerequisite expertise. So it's not really so much you're limiting your research time, as you're overlapping blog writing with your regular work.

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.

Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour

#6
post #3

Take it from a very expensive copywriter: you cannot write a quality blog post in 1 hour. 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 ;)

The New Yorker is an unfair bar, though. Most founders stand to gain a lot from just writing, and many of them don't because they're (often) engineers, not writers.

Edit: The parent comment originally said something along the lines of "...there's a reason you don't see anyone from Baremetrics in The New Yorker."

Edit: Now the New Yorker comment is back.

Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour

#7
post #3

Take it from a very expensive copywriter: you cannot write a quality blog post in 1 hour. 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 ;)

Maybe it's because that's not where our customers are? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I write most of our posts in ~1 hour and hot dog, here we are on HN and you're reading it. :)

Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour

#8
post #6
post #3

Take it from a very expensive copywriter: you cannot write a quality blog post in 1 hour. 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 ;)

The New Yorker is an unfair bar, though. Most founders stand to gain a lot from just writing , and many of them don't because they're (often) engineers, not writers. Edit: The parent comment originally said something along the lines of "...there's a reason you don't see anyone from Baremetrics in The New Yorker." Edit: Now the New Yorker comment is back.

Even if you're a New Yorker-calibre writer, you won't be able to write anything of "quality" in less than an hour.

Now imagine if you're not a New Yorker-calibre writer!

(I'm a pretty snobby reader and still like the occasional techie-founder post. You don't have to be a copywriting wizard to write something substantive, but it isn't enough to just commit text to the page. You can tell when someone has thought deeply and laboured over a piece of writing. The idea that you can write something worthy of other people's time in one hour is cut-and-dry clickbait.)

Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour

#9
It depends on your audience.

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...

Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour

#10
post #3

Take it from a very expensive copywriter: you cannot write a quality blog post in 1 hour. 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 ;)

Maybe it's because that's not where our customers are? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I write most of our posts in ~1 hour and hot dog, here we are on HN and you're reading it. :)

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