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Opinion

Find Your Moonlighting Strategy to Writing Good Content

One of the things I found myself thinking a lot at work was my moonlighting endeavor with blogging. The reality was I was investing in a possible future. So I pushed myself farther to question fully what it is that I have to do everyday to get ahead. That push was mostly towards better content. So

Sai Bharath 1 Stories

Tuesday December 31, 2019 , 3 min Read

TIME CONSTRAINTS

There isn’t enough time for research. You’re too tired to write. The concepts can be too technical to understand. It ends up being more work than fun.

WRITING STYLE

You can sound pretty desperate when you’re out of it. Changing your writing style to one with purpose comes with practice. Persuasion is unconvincing, not authentic, weak.

RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT

There’s too much information out there so finding a good mentor is a mission. You go through a long line of bad advice and spend money on products that end up teaching you nothing.

Now this is bad for several reasons:

Bad advice gives you bad outcomes.
You waste your time and energy.
Money and your efforts are depleted.
There’s a bad impression on future opportunities.
You become part of the failed dreams.

Knowing that to truly succeed, it had to start with my content. So I began to outline how I was writing. If I could put down the challenges I was facing perhaps I can then change them.

Here was what I found:

BEFORE

Coming home after work there are worries and anxieties over content. No clear focus, I would try to reference my research for material. Then when it became too late, writing became more work than fun.

DURING

Grappling with old beliefs in writing to change tone and voice, style is uncertain. Story is lacking purpose. There is no value in my thoughts.

AFTER

I leave the editing and proofreading process for later. Sometimes it takes too much time to rewrite, I overwork myself just to make the midnight post.

This revealed for me what was happening so I developed a strategy to fit it into my current schedule. Then I went ahead and implemented it to efficiently blog better.

It worked? And below were my strategies:

BEFORE

Clear all worries by writing early in the morning. This would eliminate stress and allow the creative efforts of writing to flow with ideas. Being relax will let you think better and you won’t likely become distracted by unfinished tasks lingering in the back of your mind.

By giving yourself a nice pen, notebook, quiet place to do this, you’ll also find that motivation becomes a game of accumulating rewards.

DURING

Let the flow of the story unfold. Do not correct yourself. Reference to past topics you’ve written about if you can and tie that into the present. Continue the conversation of an old post can add value to your content.

AFTER

Since the writing was done in the morning, you can look at it again after coming home from work. With different eyes you can complete the final draft. Try not to put it off too long. This will give you time to do new research which is beneficial for next day’s post.

While moonlighting is different for everyone, your work ethics and consistent efforts on writing good content will eventually prevail. I know I’m still working on writing good content, but I don’t think bloggers become who they are overnight without practice.

So if you’re a moonlighter like myself, keep the dream alive by practicing everyday to become a better writer. Look at your schedule objectively and change what you can to accomplish the task.