by Jennifer Eblin

Created on: February 19, 2010

Web content varies greatly from the articles you read in newspapers and magazines. Readers looking for information online have a limited attention span. They need the information quickly and in an easy to read format. If you’ve ever written any articles on Helium, then you understand how that works. Longer articles often aren’t rated as high because the reader doesn’t want to weed through a lot of extraneous information simply to find the meat of the article.

When you’re reading a newspaper or magazine, you do so at a leisurely pace, taking your time to flip through the pages and make sure you’ve gotten all the information. You don’t necessarily have that same amount of time when reading online articles. The kids are shouting to play their video games, the husband wants to check his email and you need to get work done too.

This all relates to how fast you write an article, which is something that beginner writers often don’t know or understand. They may spend 2 hours writing a well crafted article, but receive only a small amount for their work. I remember when I first started out, spending an hour on articles that only paid $2-4 and earning less than minimum wage. It took me a long time to figure out how to write articles faster and get more money coming in.

Before you spend an hour on your next article, remember that readers only have a few minutes to read the article, which means you need to get the primary information out fast. Don’t bother with a lot of words that don’t relate to the article, unless you’re just working on getting your word count up and your editor doesn’t mind. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people who hire writers to write fast web content and don’t care much about what the words say, as long as they use the right amount of words and use keywords.

If you really want to learn how to write faster, you need to learn how to focus your attention and work on similar articles at once. I average two articles an hour using this method. Instead of picking articles that have no connection, I start with a central theme and then find similar articles to work on.

As soon as you come up with one article idea, look for ways to spin that into several other articles and maybe even a series of articles. For example, if you’re writing about Christmas gift ideas for dads, spin that into gifts for single dads, fishing dads, golfing dads and dads who travel frequently. Before you know it, you’ll be cranking out dozens of articles within a week and without being chained to your computer.

Learn more about this author, Jennifer Eblin.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.