Write 100 articles in 100 days: Top 10 Lessons I Learned

Write 100 articles in 100 days

From January 1st, 2010 to April 10, 2010 I accepted the challenge of writing 100 articles in 100 days. Some times I thought I wouldn’t make it because I became very busy with tasks related to my web design business and got behind in my writing. Because I had made a commitment to myself and publicly to my friends I pushed on. This meant I sometimes had to write 5 articles each day to catch up.

Top 10 lessons I learned

1. Be Motivated

If I was not motivated to write 100 articles in 100 days it would have been very difficult to complete the task. My main motivations included:

Enjoyment of writing articles
Ok, I admit it was sometimes stressful to come up with a new topic or take time of my day to write an article when I had more pressing tasks to fulfill. Once I begin writing the creative juices start to flow and my excitement builds as I work towards completing the article. It gives me a great sense of punishment when I’ve finished writing and submitting the article for publication.

Free advertising
Writing articles is a great way to increase website traffic for free. Instead of using paid advertising creating and publishing articles on a regular basis generates a continuous flow of visitors.

Content development
Owning a blog means new content needs to be added frequently and consistently. Making a commitment to write 100 articles in 100 days enabled new blog posts to easily be created.

Search engine rankings
Article marketing has been my main source of web traffic for years because many of my indivdual articles have either achieved top rankings or they have helped increase the rankings of my web pages.

2. Do keyword research

To generate a list of topics to write about I would use the free WordTracker tool and the Google AdWords keyword research tool. These tools show the number of monthly searches for targeted keywords in my niche. If you weave these keywords into your articles it enables the search engines to index them and rank them accordingly. If you’re lucky sometimes one article will appear on the first page of the search engines and generate a nice stream of continuous traffic back to your website.

3. Do market research

Sometimes it’s difficult to come up with a list of topics to write about. One of the best ways to generate new ideas is to visit forums, blogs, YouTube and other locations on the web where people in your niche often visit. By participating in conversations, answering questions, leaving comments, you get a good idea what people in your niche are thinking about.

4. Create an article series

Writing a bunch of articles is easier if you have a topic that generates a series of subtopics. For example I created a series of articles on web hosting to complete the last 10 articles for the 100 articles in 100 days. This helps you to get into your article writing zone instead of scratching your head trying to churn out one new article every day.

5. Set aside a block of time for writing

If you don’t set aside a specific time each day for writing an article you’ll easily get caught up with other tasks and end up procrastinating. This means you’ll get behind on your writing and have to write several articles later on to catch up. This can be very stressful particularly if you have a full day of business to complete. I set aside the first hour of the day to write my article because:

  • It’s the most creative time of the day
  • I’ve spent one hour marketing my website by creating new content
  • I know it will generate new traffic
  • I’ll have new content to add to my blog
  • I’ll be able to repurpose the content later into a video article and/or a report

6. Use speech recognition software to increase your writing speed

The first 50 days of the 100 article day challenge I was typing approximately one article per day. Sometimes I would procrastinate and have to catch up by writing several articles per day. This became very stressful because it used up a large chunk of my day which I had assigned for other business tasks. After becoming familiar with Dragon Naturally Speaking (speech recognition software) I could easily create 2 articles in the same time that it took me to type one article. After some practice with the software I was producing 2 to 3 articles per day.

7. Improve writing skills

The saying “practice makes perfect” is really true. The more articles you write the better writer you become. Ideas begin to flow more freely, writing becomes faster and proofreading becomes easier (make less mistakes). Writing 100 articles 100 days forced me to write more efficiently by creating more articles in less time.

8. Incredible results

  • My blog traffic has increased by 2500 visitors per month as a result of continually adding articles to it over the last 100 days.
  • I’ve an extra 100 articles working for me 24/7/365 at Ezinearticles.
  • Several new articles at Ezinearticles are receiving lots of new views every day.
  • Many of the articles written during 100 days achieved first page rankings in Google and other major search engines.

9. Limited time to promote articles

Even though I was able to accomplish writing 100 articles 100 days I did not have the time to adequately promote them. For example I had limited time for: generating back links by commenting on related blogs, forums, creating video articles, writing short reports and participating in other social media properties.

10. If I did it all over again I would…

  • Create a list of 100 topics
  • Exclusively use Dragon Naturally Speaking to write my articles
  • Integrate social media tools to distribute my content automatically
  • Add social media icons to my blog so visitors can easily share the content with others.
  • Create more video articles and submit them to video sharing websites

Also read: How to Write Articles Quickly When You Can’t Type Fast

Write your comments below if you wish to share lessons you learned or have questions about article marketing.

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Learn how to attract a continuous stream of NEW visitors to your website by picking up a copy of Article Marketing Strategies.

Herman Drost is the CEO of Web Design Maryland

Comments

  1. I wanted so badly to do this. Maybe next time!

    Great post. Do you realize you can have ezinearticles.com automatically tweet your articles? If you aren’t already doing that, it would give you at least “some” promotion.

    http://members.ezinearticles.com/social-media/twitter/

  2. Glennette..thanks for your comment. Yes, I’ve been using the integration of Twitter with EA. You can also integrate Twitter with YouTube for video articles.

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