I have a little more motivation to tighten my blog post draft process because of Podcasting Blogger. It will be my third live blog.
I’m taking a really, really long time to draft the third and final piece of the Defining Success Series for Mike Writing. I think three weeks have passed since part two.
I’m happy with what I have written –well, more so what I have recorded by looking at the outline. I haven’t written anything but an outline. The body of the draft of in recorded audio.
I want to capture the process of going from topic idea to publishing. And for the same reason I put out any content at all: I think the process could help someone else.
My draft process is what I mean by recording from an outline. I’ll explain.
I take a topic idea, and I decide on 2-3 main points that I want to use to support that idea. I type a full intro, then I type the full conclusion that mirrors the intro. I write all of those things on my big white board in outline form: Intro, Main Points, Conclusion. I don’t ALWAYS write out the intro and conclusion on the board. Then for the body of the main points, I talk into a iPhone’s voice recorder recorder. Each element gets a separate track beginning with the intro. I do the entry to hear how it sounds and retype as needed.
Originally I hadn’t given myself parameters on how long I should talk about a certain topic and things like that, but I’m refining the draft process so I can give solid, useful tips to other bloggers. I want to be able to kick out each main point in under two minutes. After I’ve done all the talking in the voice recorder I sit down with Google Docs, where the intro and conclusion are waiting, and I finish typing out the main points the body using the recordings.