The 10 Minute Step Article Writing Formula For Beginners

May 12th, 2008 | by Chris |

Article marketing is a very effective way to bring traffic to your website and improve its search engine ranking, yet many marketers still don’t use it due to the difficulties they are facing when they try to produce them. Lack of inspiration, not knowing how to start and how to end and what to put in the middle, disability to concentrate for the necessary amount of time in order to finish it, or constant distractions as they call it, and many other problems or excuses.

I wrote before about article writing tips but today I want to talk about a new method that is suited for beginners that are entering this fascinating world. One of the biggest problems they are facing is that the writing of an article seem to them like a whole elephant they have to eat. And we all know that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

But what elephants have to do with articles?

Besides a metaphor in order to get you into my thinking, absolutely nothing. And here’s the story. I read recently that a very good way when you work with to-do or task lists is to have each task take no more than 10 minutes in order to get accomplished. That way you avoid getting put off by thinking of the workload for tasks if it were combined plus every time you accomplish each of them you get more energy to continue.

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Now let’s take this concept and applied it to article writing. In order to complete an article you have to go through this steps.

1. Deciding the subject
2. Doing research for information
3. Make a quick and very basic draft
4. Write it

If we apply the 10 minute step formula you would have to spend 10 minutes on deciding about what you are going to write (the subject), 10 minute for research on the Internet, 10 minutes for making the draft and of course not 10 minutes on writing the article.

When we get into the writing we need to break it further so it would become realistic the amount of time need to spend on it. So let’s give ten minutes for each paragraph. For a five paragraph article including the introduction and the conclusion that would be 50 minutes which is adequate even for a beginner. So our steps now are

1. Subject - 10 mins
2. Research – 10 mins
3. Draft – 10 mins
4. Introduction (first paragraph) – 10 mins
5. Second Paragraph – 10 mins
6. Third Paragraph – 10 mins
7. Fourth Paragraph – 10 mins
8. Conclusion (last paragraph) – 10 mins

All together 80 minutes or 1 hour and 20 minutes. Now seasoned writers would kill me for spending so much time on one article, but this is for novices trying to produce their first ones.

But the most powerful thing is that you don’t have to go through all this steps together in one session, you can put inside as long time breaks you would like and even better give a small reward to yourself for completing each step. It could be anything from your favorite game to your favorite snack. If it is your first article you are trying to write you can space the steps into different days so you have one step to do each day. I know it’s too long but is better than nothing.

As you progress you gain confidence and improve your skills and your ability to concentrate and produce, you can start shortening the breaks and even the time-lengths of the tasks to the point of going through the whole procedure within an hour and no breaks. Who knows, you may end to the point of becoming one of the super-duper writers that completes an article within 15 minutes, provided he knows about the subject.

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