Day 18/30

It’s just my luck that I would finally share the URL of this blog to the ViperChill audience and then I wouldn’t be able to write an update until 13 hours after waking up.

I did wake up at 5am, but I soon went back to bed (explanation after the jump).

So I woke up on time. Drank a ton of water. Meditated. Opened my laptop and…

A folder icon with a question mark flashing away. It seems like it’s a common issue with Macbook Pro’s and it’s not the first time I’ve seen it myself. Usually rebooting does the trick, but not today.

I have a PC set-up at home but I’m not at home and won’t be for the next few days, so I’ll be writing this article on a single screen (which is fine with me…they’re often less distracting).

Fortunately Diggy purchased a Surface Pro 4 for me for my birthday a few months back, but unfortunately I dropped the charger in a bowl of milk (you can’t make this up) and hadn’t gotten around to replacing it.

It turns out that finding a charger for a Surface Pro 4 is incredibly difficult. It was only in the fourth shop I visited (in the third mall) that I was able to actually find it.

Needless to say I didn’t even get started on the article I’m working on until 2pm.

My story of self-pity out of the way, let’s get into the writing process.

LIVE: How to Write a 6,000+ Word Article on SEO

On Monday or Tuesday I hope to go live with a new article about link building tactics that work right now (many of which will be advanced and new to the SEO world).

I’ve had this article prepped for quite a while but I was massively put off from writing it when my Evernote notes seemed to just disappear. Not just for this blog post but for a few other things I’ve been working on as well.

I have no idea if it’s because I didn’t let Evernote sync properly before closing it or something similar, but the notes were gone, and I was pretty bummed out about it.

So while I’ve had the post in my head for quite a while, I really am starting the writing from scratch today.

I will say something upfront that may surprise you: I do not enjoy writing. At all.

I know that’s probably odd to read from someone who has written over a million words of advice online (which includes 500,000+ words of free content on ViperChill), but it’s true.

I have never been excited to write, and if there’s anything I procrastinate on when it comes to my work, it’s writing.

That being said, I love the idea of sharing something that someone else has not written about before. That is exactly what drives me to write. It’s probably a bit egotistical if I’m honest, but I don’t think there’s any harm in that if I’m genuinely trying to help people.

I want to write things that other people haven’t written about before and are genuinely useful in our industry. So while I don’t like writing, I love the ideas I have to write about, and I love having written. Hopefully that makes sense.

That last statement, “I love having written” is quite key to my writing ‘success’ online.

Whenever I publish a new article I’ve read it at least 10 times before it goes live (they can take 20-30 minutes just to read once since my articles are usually very long) and five to six times after. It still amazes me that people point out spelling mistakes to me. I don’t know how I don’t catch them after 15 times of reading and a run through Word’s spell checker.

Reading it after it goes live is honestly just for the enjoyment of having it out there. I put so much time and energy into these things that I kind of “soak them in” once they’re live.

I realise I’m sounding weirder and weirder now but hey…I’m just being honest.

So today I didn’t get to do as much writing as I would like but the most important thing is to get the headings down. I write the headings of a post before I ever write an introduction or start filling out a certain heading.

I also write things which may or may not be true, but I don’t want to forget having written them.

For instance, I’m going to talk about the AROUND Google search operator which I’ve never seen another person blog about before, at least not in the SEO world.

In the post so far about the operator I have written this:

If we search for something like ‘niche “submit” AROUND(2) “article” we can see pages for a specific niche or from a specific website which reveal any sentences where submit and article are only two words apart.

The truth is that I have no idea if that’s true. I know how the operator works, but I don’t know if “submit” and “article” need to be in quotes. Yet, I’ll keep writing things like this without checking them because if I check it then I’m taken out of the ‘zone’ with my writing.

It would only take 20 seconds for me to test the query in Google but probably a few minutes to get back into the flow after having done so. I write and write and write and write and then clean everything up at the end.

So, the headings are done which is a relief as I wanted to make sure I would have enough original ideas to make it a huge article and fortunately I do.

I have only written 538 words so far (half the length of this blog entry) but filling out each section will generally be the easy part. The hard part for me is making everything flow, easy to read, and insightful once it’s all put together.

And of course, having an idea that’s worth reading in the first place.

Apolgoies for writing this entry later today, but hopefully there were a few little insights in the above.