I have been sailing and boating since I was two or three years old and I don’t get sea sick but sometimes I get a similar feeling when I am late getting my next blog post written.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could consistently write posts in one or two hours? Or should you spend longer to write deeper content?

According HubSpot’s survey of 4,000 marketers, most marketers spend 1-2 hours writing a 500-word blog post.

But for many, that is not what it feels like when we are faced with the task and we need re-assurance we’re not crazy or stupid for taking longer.

Another study by Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios asked 1,074 bloggers the same 11 questions:

Key Findings:

• “In 2014, we found 54% of bloggers spending 2 hours or less per post. This year, it’s down to 48%.
• A small but growing number of bloggers spend much more time on each post. 16% of bloggers spend more than four hours per post (up from 13%). 6% of bloggers spend more than six hours on a typical blog post.
• Time spent writing the typical blog post has increased 8% to more than 2.5 hours per post.”

There’s a lot of contradictory information about how long it takes to write a blog post and blogging in general but the following 16 experts should help put things in perspective.

1. Neil Patel – Quick Sprout, Kiss Metrics and Crazy Egg

Practice makes perfect:

Here is a bit more information from blog comments where Neil discusses his blog writing process:

2. Michael Hyatt – michaelhyatt.com

Another example of improving over time:

3. Jeff Bullas – jeffbullas.com

Focus is the key:

4. Chris Brogan – chrisbrogan.com

Many writers are obsessive:

5. Kevin Lee – Buffer

Buffer has over 700,000 visitors a month on their blog, so their writers are great to emulate.   Kevin Lee says:

Here is how he breaks out each activity in terms of time spent:

Kevin also points out:

And Jon Morrow of Boost Blog Traffic has spent entire days just coming up with headlines. So some of this is all relative.

6. Belle Beth Cooper – Buffer

Not everyone starts off writing fast, as you can see below.

After reworking her routine, Belle Beth was able to cut her writing time from 2 days to 4 hours and reports that:

7. Jon Morrow – smartblogger.com

When Jon was starting out, he spent 50 hours writing a guest post for ProBlogger.

Here is the post:

How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World

Jon also says:

8. Danny Inny

Danny is a master of guest posting and wrote 14 Posts and 17,481 Words in 6 Days:

9. Ramsay Taplin – The Blog Tyrant

Ramsay Taplin of The Blog Tyrant also spends a lot of time on just the headlines:

10. Krisiti Hines – kikolani.com and kristihines.com

Kristi Hines, an amazing blogger and social media expert, writes in half day chunks, while tuning out email and social:

11. Ginny Soskey – Hubspot

Ginny Soskey from Hubspot shoots for a couple hours jamming to Pandora:

12. Meghan Keaney Anderson – HubSpot

Meghan Keaney Anderson avoids taking all day on posts by avoiding rabbit holes:

13. Joel Klettke – businesscasualcopywriting.com

Joel is clearly on a roll when writing 40 hour posts for top blogs:

14. Brian Dean – backlinko.com

2 hours apparently won’t cut it when you are a walking link magnet!

15. Vitaly Friedman – smashingmagazine.com

Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine says:

16. Seth Godin – sethgodin.com

Research is a major part of writing a blog post and in an interview with Seth Godin on CopyBlogger, he says:

While he didn’t exactly answer how long it takes him to write a blog post, it sounds like he spends most of his time researching and when he sits down to write it comes out in an absolute burst of a water hose in 15 minutes.

Seth writes daily and his posts are some of the shortest in the industry but also some of the most read. His writing feels more like looking at a Van Gogh painting, whereas most outstanding posts are like looking at a beautifully painted Victorian house.

Conclusion

There is no exact formula for how to write a blog post or precisely how many hours it takes.

Different people have different styles but you can learn to work more efficiently. In fact you must work in a more streamlined way, so you can spend more time promoting.

You also need to factor in your goals.

If your goal is to write a piece of epic content to get links, social shares and PR buzz or your first guest post on a top site, then you will likely be spending 10 hours or more, whereas your “regular” posts might be done in as little as 1-2 hours.

And hey, if you are Seth Godin or Chris Brogan you might be able to whip of some of the most read posts in the world in just 15 minutes!

If SEO is your goal, then you should also be aware that according to Searchmetrics, the average word count for a top 10 ranking page is 1,285 words, up from 975 words in 2014. So busting out daily 500 word quickie content stuffed with keywords, might not do as much as you think.

Regardless of how long it takes, learn from the best and be sure to develop your own God given voice.

Once you find your voice and can work “smarter not harder”, you will be well on your way to reaping the magnificent rewards that blogging and building authority can bring.

How long does it take you or your team members to write a 500 word or 1,000+ word blog post?

1. Google removes sidebar ads

In a move that made people think the sky is falling, Google removed the ads from the right side of the search engine result pages that people are accustomed to.

Some people speculate that this will cause PPC prices to go up and make it so that running paid search requires a specialized team and not just one expert.

Organic results are pushed lower down the page which could either diminish organic success or people will simply get used to scrolling because so many people would rather look at organic results rather than just paid ads.

In early January 2016, Bruce Clay predicted Google pushing more ads above the fold and said:

“The web ceases to be a gold rush, evolving into a pay-to-play space. The few sites gaining true organic rankings and holding them will be gold. The rest will buy ads.”

SEO rankings may be harder than ever but they are worth their weight in gold.

2. The rise of social selling

Check out this infographic about social selling to learn more about how sales and marketing are aligning and combining great content in the selling process.

Gone are the days when salespeople were largely about cold calling. If that’s all your sales people are doing you are in for a world of hurt. It’s much more efficient to have them connecting with potential customers by sharing great content from your experts and connecting on social media, as part of the engagement process, rather than just pounding them with calls.

3. Facebook reaches 1.59 billion monthly active users

If Facebook were a country it would be the largest in the world. Check out the stats here.

As an old school SEO expert, it took me a while to get on board with fully embracing Facebook as a serious business marketing platform. I still have a long way to go but with ever growing stats like these you just can’t ignore the fact that many of your customers are there.

One simple way to get started is simply running Facebook ads for things such as promoting e-books and content – to get people to sign up to your newsletter and sell them later. Facebook ads are reasonably priced right now and I expect them to get more expensive and as even more people catch on.

4. LinkedIn Account Targeting launches

LinkedIn describes account targeting as follows:

“This exciting new functionality makes it possible for marketers to tailor their Sponsored Updates or Sponsored InMail campaigns to a priority list of accounts. This ability, combined with LinkedIn’s profile targeting, will allow our clients to market products and generate opportunities to the right personas within the accounts that matter most to them. Our goal is to give them a platform that accurately targets influencers, and empowers them to deliver relevant content that translates into meaningful results.”

And here is a graphic of how it works:

5. Google Scholar

Google Scholar which debuted in 2004 isn’t exactly new but it’s something I have recently gotten more excited about. In-depth research is required for creating quality content and Google scholar can help you dig in more deeply on certain topics.

Scientific data, statistics, scholarly journals and studies are a treasure trove for creating content that has depth.

Conclusion

This week’s digital marketing news theme has a lot of information around running ads but keep in mind that those ads can often be geared toward promoting content that positions you as an expert.

In the race to keep shareholders happy, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and all of the Internet age companies are under pressure to generate revenue.

This rat race will never end and the important thing is to pull your head out of the digital sand, learn about how these advertising opportunities work and use them to your advantage, while building your brand and positioning yourself as an expert.

You have impeccable content! Flawless spelling! But your blog is going over like a lead balloon. Maybe that garbled punctuation is making your writing harder to read than Egytian Hieroglyphics?

These punctuation tips are going to make your dense tangle of words as easy to read as Dr. Suess.

1. Commas – ,

Commas are the equivalent of regular braking in your car, nothing dramatic, just slows you down. It’s better to use too many commas than too few. They work beautifully in lists, and lists often come in three’s, like so many things in life: “he sought her here, there and everywhere”. Notice you seldom use a comma before and, which is a conjunction. But there are crazy people out there who subscribe to the serial comma aka the Harvard comma, which is for people who believe you can never have too many commas, even before the and at the end of the list, as in: “He ate tomatoes, pickles, and rutabagas. 

2. Semi-Colon – ;

Semi-colons are your friend, they both cause an abrupt slow-down in your writing and link two mini-sentences that aren’t strong enough to be complete sentences on their own into one full sentence. A semi-colon stops a run-on sentence dead in its tracks.

Here’s a sample sentence with a semi-colon:

“My blind date introduced herself; she had a mustache that would make Mark Twain green with envy.” 

3. Colon – :

No, it’s not an internal organ. It’s the stepbrother of the semi-colon. It’s more of a stop than a semi-colon, and it has more drama than a semi-colon. It links two sort-of sentences and can be the start of a list.

Here’s a sample sentence:

“The president of the company had been siphoning funds for years: singlehandedly, he ruined the company.”

See how it makes the second half of the sentence more dramatic?

Here’s a colon used to start a list:

“I decided I had to get out in the see the world: Saugus, Mass., Danvers, Mass. and eventually, Beverly, Mass. 

4. Period – .

Everyone is a Jedi Master when it comes to periods. You just stick them at the end of a sentence. A period is the equivalent of jamming on the brakes; the sentence is over.  Nothing to elaborate here, they’re as simple as blinking your eye.

But! When you have a sentence that ends with “Beverly, Mass.” you never use two periods, the abbreviation for Mass. does double duty as a period.

It isn’t quite an official use of periods, but you can use three periods to create a melancholy tone, as in:

“She walked out of the house forever…” 

5. Exclamation Marks – ! – And Question Marks –? –

An exclamation mark is the equivalent of a shout: “Watch out for that moose!” and a question mark asks a question, “Did you bring the wine?”

Nothing to elaborate here, except only use one question mark or exclamation point per sentence. A lot of people can’t help themselves; they want to amp up their sentence by: “You let an eight year old drive the car!!!” Multiples of either are strictly for amateurs. Let the sentence create the drama, not the amount of exclamation marks/ question marks. 

6. Em Dash –

Em Dashes create a pause in the sentence to allow you to insert supplementary information without losing the sentence’s train of thought.

Here’s one in action:

“Jack thought of all the disappointments in his life – the shoes that were too small, his girlfriend’s cat, Maroon 5 – and decided he’d move to France where these things wouldn’t be a problem.”

Notice that you click the spacer bar once before an em dash and once after; that creates the sense of space to interject the related thought without cramping the main sentence’s style.

Please note: in Microsoft Word, you can make an em dash by typing two hyphens back to back. 

7. Hyphens –

Hyphens aren’t glamorous, like a semi-colon, but they are useful tools to add to your writing arsenal. Basically, hyphens are the glue that holds phrases together. Here’s a few examples:

• State-of-the-art
• Off-campus
• Insert-your-expression-here

They can also add clarity to a sentence. The first example is a sentence without a hyphen, the second, same sentence, hyphen added.

“Bayonne has little town charm.”

“Bayonne has little-town charm.”

Now you have to take the hyphen pledge: “I vow never to use a hyphen where an em dash belongs.” Using a hyphen instead of an em dash is worse than a 73 year old man wearing a white sock and a black sock while wearing Birkenstock leather sandals with runner’s shorts. 

8. Parentheses – ( )

Parentheses sounds like someone out of the Old Testament. Rather, it allows you to include relevant information to your sentence, boxed between your two ( ), that would require several sentences to say otherwise. You can stick parentheses within a sentence, such as this:

“There are numerous times, (brushing your teeth, strumming your harp, shopping at Walmart), where Zen Buddhism assumes great clarity.”

*Note: the punctuation occurs before and after the parentheses, not in it.

You can also have a complete sentence in parentheses that remarks on the sentence that precedes it:

“Jack assured me he wasn’t lost.” (“As if the fact we zig-zagged across the whole state of Indiana while trying to get across town proved otherwise”.) In this case, punctuation is inside the parentheses.

And then there’s more mundane uses for parentheses:

• Numbered or lettered lists; (1) or, (A)
• Times zones – 9:34 AM (EST)
• Area codes – (978)
• Year of birth – Keith Richards (1537) (he just looks that old; he was born in 1943)
• Abbreviations – “He was appointed CEO (Chief Executive Officer)”

Parentheses add order and make combinations of words and numbers easy to read and separate.

9. Quotation Marks – “ “

Promise me you’ll never use your first two fingers on both hands to simulate quotation marks while you are talking. Save them for your blogs.

Quotation marks are great. They’re kind of like periods, everyone nails them. They simply tell the reader someone is talking. Since I’m on a roll, I’ll briefly cover rules involving quotations. It’s important to learn how to use commas and periods with quotation marks.

• Here’s an example of a period when using quotation marks:
• “I lost my mind,” said Sarah.
• Here’s an example of quotation marks with commas.
• “A priest, a rabbi and a minister walked into a bar,” Sarah said, “and the bartender gives them the evil eye.”

So, the comma pauses the sentence and keeps it becoming an unwieldy run-on juvenile delinquent.

Another important rule: when one person speaks and stops and another person begins talking, to keep it clear whose talking, never have different people talking in the same paragraph. Everyone gets a paragraph of their own.

If someone in your writing won’t stop talking, divide what they’re saying into multiple paragraphs to keep it from becoming a solid impenetrable block of words hogging the whole page. So long as the same person keeps talking, you don’t end each paragraph with quotation marks; using them means someone has finished speaking. But you start every new paragraph with a quotation mark, to indicate they’re still spewing out their monolog. When the finally relent and stop talking, you close with quotation marks. Here’s an example:

“The rabbi ordered a gin and tonic, the minister, a gimlet and the priest had a beer. It was a very wild scene. So much so, someone called the cops.

“That’s when the parrot walked into the car. ‘And what are you having?’ asked the bartender. The parrot just looked bemused.”

Note that the first paragraph doesn’t end with quotation marks and when Sarah, the narrator, quotes the bartender, instead of using this: “ “, you use: ‘ ‘ – Single quotes.

10. Italics – Italics

Italics are great for adding emphasis. Such as:

“His breath was devastatingly bad,” thought Virginia.

It’s a brilliant tool.

11. Underlining – Underlining

Underlining is the old fashioned version of italics, another great way to show emphasis. The nice thing about underlining a word or passage for emphasis is that it also visually makes the words easier to see. The opposite is true with italics. Too many words in italics looks like you’ve suddenly begun writing in one of the romance languages.

CONCLUSION: 

Masterful punctuation makes your writing superb!

Someone told me they took driving lessons from an extravagant instructor in Mexico City. She was having trouble getting her rear view mirror adjusted. The instructor said, “Don’t worry about what’s behind you; the past is the past.” Let’s apply that philosophy to the rest of the punctuation marks, there’s not many left and they’re not as important as the ones we’ve covered. Sorry, angle brackets.

It’s really easy to master punctuation, there’s not many rules like, ‘i before e except after c’, and using them with flourish is both a joy, but more important, the really important part, is that punctuation makes your brilliant writing exceptionally easy to read and to understand.

You can’t figure out why your blog is a dud. People love the content; you spent days writing it. Spell check can’t find a single word to highlight in red. You proofread it five times. What’s wrong?

Maybe your grammar is closer to the Three Stooges than Shakespeare. Bad grammar will sink any ship.

Put these ten grammar tips to work for you. Your readers will love you.

1. When is it proper to use ‘You and I’ or ‘You and me”? 

Here’s an easy tool that’s also easy to remember that gives you the perfect answer, every time

It works like this:When you find yourself writing either you and I, or you and me, write out the sentence the way it feels most comfortable to write. Now, just simply extract the word ‘you’ from your sentence, read it aloud and see if it makes sense.

• “You and I are going to be famous.”
• Same sentence, minus ‘you’ = “I going to be famous.”
• Or, “For some reason, you and me always get George Carlin’s jokes.”
• Same sentence, minus ‘you’ = “For some reason, me always gets George Carlin’s jokes.”

2. Apostrophes 

Apostrophes, 99% of the time, are a breeze. They just show something belongs to someone or something, as in:

Santa’s reindeer – (to create a singular possession: add apostrophe s)

The reindeer’s stable (to create a plural possession: add at the end of the word: apostrophe s)

Sometimes apostrophes are awkward, as in words that in in the letter S, such as Kansas.

“Kansas’s climate is temperate.” The s’s looks clunky. But it’s proper. But so is this:

“Kansas’ climate is temperate.” It’s much easier to read. And proper as well. Use this one.

In an instance where you want to indicate two people own the same thing, use an apostrophe only on the last name:

“Matilda and Grace’s Ice Cream Parlor”

Then there are words everyone gets mixed up regarding apostrophes. You just have to commit them to memory. People get these wrong because 99% of the time you can’t go wrong using an apostrophe to indicate ownership, or possession. Except for:

• Ours or Our’s?

As in, “Those tomatoes are our’s”.  Never use ‘our’s’ – just ‘ours’, as in: “Those tomatoes are ours.”

• Hers or Her’s

As in, “Is that mink coat her’s?” Never use her’s – just ‘hers’, as in:

“That mink coat is hers.”

3. Its or It’s?

In this case, Its and It’s are two different words. It’s is a contraction of it is:

“It’s a shame about Ray.”

But never use an apostrophe to show possession on the word its, as in:

“The car lost it’s wheel.”  Always go with, “The car lost its wheel.” 

4. Yours or Your’s?

Just like it’s/it, yours and you’re are two different words. You’re is a contraction of you are, as in:

“You’re the pits!”

Yours is the possessive of the word your. Never try to make a possessive by adding a contraction, as in:

“Pardon me, is this poodle your’s?” Always go with, “Pardon me, is this poodle yours?” 

5. Theirs or Their’s?

This is another exception to the 99% of the time you make a word possessive by sticking an apostrophe at the end. This is another example of a word where apostrophes don’t work.

Never do this: “I can’t find my Twisted Sister CD, but their’s is in the kitchen.”

Instead, always stick with: “I can’t find my Twisted Sister CD, but theirs is in the kitchen.” 

6. Ours or Our’s?

No apostrophes allowed to make a possessive!

Never: “Is this top hat yours or our’s?” Always go with, “Is this top hat yours or ours?” 

7. Clearing the clutter behind Their – There — They’re

Separating these three is simple, the key is memorizing the different spellings of what sounds like phonetically the same word and then it becomes simple to remember where you use each one.

• Their

Their indicates the possession(s) of a group of people, as in:

“Their wisdom revealed itself when they erected a statue of Harpo Marx.”

• There

Basically, there is what you use without thinking about it when you write sentences. It’s an autopilot word.

• It can be used as an adverb, as in:
• “Stop right there!”
• Or a pronoun, as in:
• “Is there a restroom in this place?”
• Or a noun, as in:
• “You can’t force me to go in there!”

• They’re

There is a contraction of they are, as in:

“They’re a surly bunch.”

8. When to use Who’s and when to use Whose

We’ll examine these two the same way we analyzed their/there/they’re.

• Who’s is a contraction of who is, as in

“Who’s that guy in the gorilla suit?”

• Whose is a word you use everywhere Who’s doesn’t work, which aren’t that many instances. But here are some examples:

“Whose rotten banana is this?”

“Whose kids are ripping up my dandelions?”

9. Is it Who or Whom?

Knowing when to use either word in this combo is a little tricky, mostly because you sound like an English butler when you use the word whom, as in:

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

In other words, it is becoming archaic.

Grammar Girl, a great online grammar steward (feedback@quickanddirtytips.com) came up with this somewhat complicated device of knowing when to use who or whom:

Think of it this way – Write using your natural choice for who or whom in a sentence. To find out which is right, substitute the word ‘he’ for ‘who’. Conversely, substitute the word ‘him’ for ‘whom’. I know, it takes a while to wrap your mind around it. Let’s apply the formula to these two variations on Hemingway’s book title:

1. “For Who the Bell Tolls.”
2. “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Now, in A., let’s substitute He for Who. Now it reads, “For He the Bells Toll.”

On B., let’s substitute Him for Whom. Now it is, “For Him the Bell Tolls.” Sounds awkward, but it’s proper usage.

You already know Hemingway had it right, but the formula works in defining the right use of who or whom. 

10. Ending a sentence using a preposition

English teachers always drill this mantra into you: Never end a sentence on a preposition. But usage over the years has moderated because so many people have ignored the rule so now grammar style guides are saying this is perfectly fine.

• Here’s an example of a sentence that ends on a preposition:
• “Clementine told the risqué joke she was known for.”
• To rephrase it without ending on a preposition, the sentence might be:
• “Tonight, Clementine told the risqué joke that made her famous.”

Even if the Chicago Manual of Style might let you slip by with ending on a preposition, it still is weak writing; flabby if not sloppy writing. It just takes a moments of thought to rephrase the sentence into something much more substantial and solid. 

Throw some spices into Ramen Noodles and it will be better; use the spice of your punctuation mastery and be superb!

CONCLUSION:

It may seem like these grammar insights might be more nuances than revelations, because you don’t see them addressed as often as the distinction between effect and affect. This doesn’t mean they’re any less important. In fact, they’re more important, because they’ve slipped by under the radar, only to be picked up and disapproved of by the people you want to reach most- your readers. Mastering them will only bolster your readership.