
How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour - andygcook
https://baremetrics.com/blog/founder-writing
======
trjordan
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...](https://blog.turbinelabs.io/deploy-not-equal-release-part-
one-4724bc1e726b)

~~~
pc86
> _it 's worth spending more time to get it write_

Was this an intentional pun? :)

~~~
trjordan
Jeez, no, but there's no way I'm fixing it now!

~~~
hago1234
its only human

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fluxic
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 ;)

~~~
Shpigford
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. :)

~~~
onion2k
_here we are on HN and you 're reading it_

Unless you're in the business of generating blog post views or HN comments the
fact that people are discussing it here is irrelevant. Those things are vanity
metrics. They don't matter to your business. Your post could get 10,000
upvotes and a million comments, but if you don't get a sale from all that
extra "brand awareness" you've still wasted an hour of your time.

~~~
corobo
If you're the business entity sure.

The person who wrote the article though has an ego and people reading,
reacting, responding to the article all feed the ego. Vanity metrics are the
only reason we do things after the base instincts

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bengotow
Haha not to bash on the article at all, but I laughed at the title. Here's my
take on how founders write a quality blog post in 1 hour: 1) Founder opens iA
Writer and types for an hour 2) Founder thinks post is great and publishes
immediately!

~~~
tb303
Ha, I came to say the same thing! Add "make it an ordered list with bite-sized
instructions based on survivorship bias" as well :)

~~~
terminado
I just use bullet points (unordered list) at the top, for popular buzzwords,
to serve as an ad-hoc table of contents.

    
    
      - Artificial Intelligence
      - Machine Learning
      - Neural Networks
      - Blockchain
    

Then just expound and brainstorm freely, in a stream of consciousness, for ~60
minutes, and it practically writes itself.

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padobson
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.

------
gandreani
> It various industry to industry

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

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fasteo
>>> Hemingway App

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

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

------
Steeeve
I think it's interesting that the consensus here is that you can't do quality
in an hour.

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.

~~~
CM30
Honestly, the sad truth about the world post social media is that most people
don't read past the title/thumbnail image. In a lot of cases, you could
probably just write a title and neat meta description then stick a thumbnail
on it, and if it was 'interesting' enough watch it get a few hundred/thousand
shares.

If they do get past the title, then in about 99.999% of cases, they sure as
hell won't care how well written the actual content is so long as they find
the subject interesting and they agree with the conclusions.

It's especially true of the news world, where 'get anything out the door as
long as its trending' seems to be the only way to get popularity.

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JackFr
Ernest Hemmingway, not Earnest. Yikes.

~~~
karlb
And Hemi, not Hemmi.

~~~
JackFr
What a jackass I am.

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_pdp_
Maybe you can write something quickly in one hour but then continuously
improve as you go along. That way you can come up with some semi-original
content to begin with but over time, if properly maintained, it will flourish
into something even better.

------
rdlecler1
Another idea is talk about something you’ve recently learned that you think
others would want to know, or interview someone.

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bovermyer
I'd argue that this is generally useful blog-writing advice, rather than
specific to founders.

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ianamartin
Whew. There's so much I disagree with here. Where to start?

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.

~~~
hokus
I'm no founder, I never found anything. I do have a lot of hats. Safe to say,
non of them are very fancy. The article writing hat is, you guessed it, made
of paper. I've reduced the rules to a single one (where reduced is a lie that
means I don't know any better) Whatever you do, its probably crap enough to
alienate some of the audience. Stick with however you did this. Consistency is
everything.

An example would be the frequency of posting. If you went with daily posts you
have to stick with it. People who don't like daily posts certainly wont start
reading you just because you've dropped to 1 post every 2 months. Try stay a
few drafts ahead of reality if something new has to happen every day.

A different example would be making dumb jokes or the choice of uhmmm voice?
Be humble and polite, be condescending and authoritative - don't mix the 2. If
you chose to make some kind of jokes try stick with the theme.

Back in the days when I was half serious about anything one of the things was
writing. To avoid the paper hat from self-combusting or blowing away in the
wind I made sure I had one person with relevant skills read it to fire proof
it and one grammar nazi to huff and puff at it. There is room for unreasonably
people in your life here and in our world.

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oceanghost
The author failed to achieve is own goal...

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hago1234
cant one just write a few senteces worth of questions and fish for comments?
you know you want to?

