Experience

A Full Breakdown of How
We Do it at Buffer
In my experience, one of the best ways to
write great content is to make time to write
great content.
I’m grateful that the team at Buffer
emphasizes the blog as a means of helping
others, spreading the word about Buffer,
and sharing our learnings and
improvements . This allows me to spend
the time writing.
And how do I spend that time?
I’d love to show you.
We publish four posts per week on the
Buffer blog, each post at least 1,500 words
(and typically over 2,000). I write three of
these posts. And for the past two weeks, I
tracked every minute I spent on a blog post
from research through promotion. Here’s
how it all breaks down.
How Much Time It Takes
to Write a Buffer Blog Post
I write a Buffer blog post in an average of
2 hours, 58 minutes.
The longest post took 3 hours, 33 minutes.
The shortest post took 2 hours, 23
minutes.
The post I’m writing right now took 2 hours,
42 minutes (I added it all up once I
finished).
In total, I tracked six different blog posts.
Here’s a breakdown of the word count and
the time involved in each of the six posts
from the past two weeks.
The times were really interesting to see as
they’ve improved quite a bit from when I
started with Buffer. Much like Belle’s post
on how she cut her writing time from 2
days to 4 hours , I’d say that my writing
time has decreased significantly also.
Previously, I would spend 8 to 12 hours per
post. It’s amazing to see how that time has
shrunk as I’ve gained experience and
confidence in writing for the Buffer blog.
How I Spend My Time
Writing Blog Posts
From a bird’s-eye view, here’s a quick
overview of how the three hours of
time break down specifically, according to
the different stages of my writing process.
I’d love to get into even more detail on
each of these stages below.
And a tip of the hat to the free time-
tracking tool Toggl for helping me easily
track and compile all these stats.
Research – 40 minutes per
post
One of the hallmarks of the blog posts on
the Buffer blog is the fact that they are
research-backed, scientific, data-oriented
articles with specific, actionable takeaways.
Because of this, it’s key to spend as much
time as possible to come up with the
research, science, and data to share.
My research process has sped up quite a
bit as I’ve gained experience with social
media and with the Buffer way of things.
I’m able to pull from the past to write good
chunks of articles now, with less switching
back and forth between old articles and old
threads.
To quickly find an article we’ve written
about in the past, I do a site: search in
Google.
To find resources to quote and dig into for
social media stats or strategies, I do a lot
of custom Google searches, both at
google.com and at Google Scholar (tons of
great research papers and
scientific studies).
I’ll start with a series of keywords, entering
each into a Google search.
I’ll refine the search terms, based on autofill
suggestions and suggested searches at the
bottom of the page
I’ll change the date settings to only show
results from the past year
In addition to these workflows, I also find
that a lot of research can be done before
you even start researching a blog post.
Seems a bit counterintuitive, right? Well, the
way this has worked at Buffer is that we
collect and store any interesting research in
personal Evernote files or in our team Trello
blog post board. I’ve used a method of
highlighting and tagging articles in Pocket,
or favoriting tweets that I might want to
reference later for information.
However you choose to do it, this pre-
research phase can be a great time saver
when it comes to starting a fresh blog
post.
Outline – 4 minutes per post
Some posts—not all posts—go through an
outline stage where I’ll take the research
and organize it into a loose flow. It’s all
very tentative and guess-heavy; I expect the
final product to change a lot from the initial
outline.
The outline is as simple as jotting down
the sections that I’ll end up writing and the
order in which I think they’ll appear, then
moving the research, stats, and quotables
into each section.
It helps to move things along for the writing
stage (next).
Writing – 59 minutes per post
WordPress used to have this cool Easter
egg when you switched to the distraction-
free editor. The bottom of the editor would
say, “Just Write.”
And this is such good advice. At this stage
of my writing process, just writing is the
most valuable thing I can do. I close
everything off, hop into the distraction-free
WordPress editor, and let fly whatever
comes to mind.
I always write the intro first, as it helps me
focus on where the article is headed and
makes it a bit easier psychologically to get
stuck into writing the post since I’m not
working from an entirely blank page.
As I write, I’ll keep in mind things like:
Varying sentence length
Varying paragraph size
Adding space for images (I use a
placeholder text of “//pic”)
Reminders to come back and add stats or
specifics (I leave an “xx” for missing info)
And beyond that, there’s not a whole lot
else I’ll do. Just write. Even if it’s terrible.
(Terrible is better than zilch.)
By the end of the writing stage, I’ll often
have 2,000 or more words to work with.
Editing – 26 minutes per post
I give myself the freedom to throw a bunch
of ideas, thoughts, and rambles into the
post during the writing stage because I
know the editing stage is coming. I’ll have
a chance to clean things up.
And in a lot of ways, editing is quite a bit
like Writing: Part II. There are times when
I’ll cut out huge portions of what I’ve
written before and start from scratch.
And one of the most helpful ways I’ve
found to edit is to give the article some
time to simmer, a couple hours or
preferably a day. When I can come back to
something with fresh eyes, I’m often able
to see things from a better perspective.
During the actual editing process, I’ll do the
following:
Tighten up the intro and make sure it
includes a copywriting formula or hook
Double-check that the headings are
descriptive and noticeable
Double-check that the headings are the
proper sizes (in our case, H2 vs H3 vs
bold)
Add links to past Buffer articles in the intro
and throughout the story where appropriate
Add any missing info like stats or source
attribution
Remove sections that don’t add value to the
article; trim down super long sections
Add formatting like bold, italics, blockquote,
indent, bullet lists, numbered lists
Proofread
Creating images – 30
minutes per post
Content with visuals gets 94 percent more
views.
So we aim to be quite purposeful in finding
and creating great visuals for each and
every post.
I’ll typically find or create the following
images for each new article:
1. A title image made in Pablo , featuring the
keyword of the post, a subhead, and an
icon
2. A main image to serve as the background
for the article heading
3. Screenshots
4. Pinterest-sized graphic, vertical and 735 x
1102
5. Miscellaneous graphics, as needed
For creating all this cool stuff, I’ve found a
pretty solid go-to list of tools and
websites. Here are the ones I visit most
often:
Pablo , for title images and quote images
Canva, for miscellaneous graphics and
Pinterest-sized graphics
Skitch , for annotated screenshots
Cloud App , for animated GIFs
Compressor.io , for compressing large
images into smaller file sizes
IconFinder and The Noun Project, for icons
UnSplash and Death to the Stock Photo , for
free images (there’re are tons of other
great, free image sources as well)
Real quick, here’s a sample of what I do
when creating the title image for blog
posts. I’ve got this down to about two
minutes of time.
1. Enter the headline, set the headline to Open
Sans font, Extra Large, Bold
2. Click to add secondary text, set the text to
Satisfy font, Large
3. Find an image on UnSplash, abstract yet
perhaps somewhat related to the post, e.g.
a car dashboard for a post about metrics or
an airplane for a post about growth
4. Upload the image, set to Blur
5. Find an icon at IconFinder, set the search to
Flat Icons only
6. Download the icon and upload to Pablo as
the “Add a logo” option, resize as needed
7. Center all elements
8. Download to my computer
SEO – 4 minutes per blog
post
For SEO, a lot of it comes into place early
on in our blogging process. In fact, it often
happens before the process even begins.
The idea stage is sometimes the best time
to consider the keyword you’ll be focusing
on in the story. When you have a keyword
in mind from the start, the SEO part of the
writing process goes pretty quick.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve had the
privilege of writing posts with clear
keywords like “content promotion,”
“collaboration tools,” and “social media
checklist.”
Of course, there are times when the
keyword isn’t quite as crystal clear. When
I’m in doubt about which keyword to focus
on, I’ll do a quick search in Google.
I go to trends.google.com and type in the
keywords I’m considering. Here’s what
Google Trends had to say about this post
on how to spend your time writing a blog
post.
Also, another method is to open an
incognito browser window, go to Google,
and begin typing potential keywords and
noticing the Autofill results that come up.
For the Buffer blog, we use a WordPress
plugin, Yoast SEO, to handle the specifics
of implementing SEO strategy into each
post.This makes it so that we have just a
few small tasks to do on each post in order
to set the SEO.
Choose a focus keyword
Write an SEO headline—used on Google,
Facebook, etc.
Write a description
Edit the article URL
Occasionally, to make sure that the content
is focused on that keyword or phrase, I’ll
do a quick search inside the article (CTRL
+F) to see how many times the keyword is
mentioned or to rewrite any phrases that
are perhaps similar.
Headlines – 6 minutes per
post
Recently, I began an attempt at a sort of
Upworthy headline challenge.
The writers at Upworthy write 25 headlines
for every post and then choose the best
ones from the list to share on social media
and test as the winning headline.
I’ve been able to do 15 headlines per post
so far, and it’s been a really awesome
exercise.
Perhaps what’s helped me most with this is
being able to reference a couple of articles
on the Buffer blog that talk about headlines:
Ultimate Headline Formulas
Headline Strategies and the Psychology
Behind Them
Having these close by is really useful for
brainstorming the different options for
headlines, and it’s helped me expand my
creativity and openness to new headline
ideas.
And not all of the headlines are winners! (In
my experience so far, about 1/3 of them
might be worth keeping.) For example, here
is the list of headlines I brainstormed for
the post that eventually was titled The
Delightfully Short Guide to Social Media
ROI.
Promotion – 7 minutes per
post
There are so many cool tips and techniques
for promoting your content. I’m keen to
explore a lot of them further; at this stage,
we do just a couple of things for Buffer
blog posts.
What I’ll do is share each new post
multiple times to social media, according
to a sharing schedule we’ve iterated on here
at Buffer: multiple times over the first few
days to Twitter, once today and once later
in the week to Facebook and Google+,
once to LinkedIn.
And then each new post also goes out to
our RSS email list (you can sign up here if
you’re interested). And this process
happens automatically. Each new post is
grabbed by MailChimp and sent out at
10:00 a.m. Pacific Time.
How my process has
changed over time
One thing I’ve found about my writing
process is that it routinely seems to
change.
Things happen during the week that allow
me to adjust the schedule and I’ll stumble
upon a new system of writing—and keep
that system until a new one falls into place.
I particularly enjoyed a system I used when
starting out at Buffer: The 3-day Blogpost
Process . It worked like this:
Day one: Research
Day two: Writing
Day three: Editing
And the idea is to stagger the schedule so
that you’re doing one of each stage for
three different blog posts each day.
In this way, I was able to write up to five
blog posts per week and felt great about
the extra time to focus and reflect on the
content that I was publishing.
(My schedule has shifted slightly to more
of a one-day method of writing where I’ll
get the majority done in one day and then
do a final read-over on the day of publish.)
What does your blogging
process look like?
It’d be awesome to hear how you blog, how
you spend your time, and any tips you’ve
picked up.
Feel free to share your experience in the
comments or ask any follow-up about the
way I do things at Buffer.
Image sources: Pablo, Startup Stock Photos ,
WordPress, Kapost
Originally written Apr 15, 2015. Last updated
Jan 22, 2016

Kevan Lee
Director of marketing at
Buffer, the social media
management platform to
help small businesses grow.
Follow http://www.twitter.com/kevanlee