13 Reasons Why You Should Dictate Your Blog Posts Instead of Writing Them

DictaBlogger (Dictation Blogger) is a blog dedicated to helping bloggers from all walks of life produce a lot more content in less time.

I get asked all the time:

How do I write more than 10,000 words per day?
How can I write more with less time?
How can I write a novel quickly?
How to write faster
How to write an article fast
How to write faster essays

ALL these questions have just one answer: DICTATION

Here are the 13 most obvious reasons why you should dictate your blog posts this way instead of writing them out.

Reason #1: Produce more content in less time and MAKE MORE MONEY

The average American speaks at a rate anywhere between 125 to 150 words per minute. In 10 minutes, with the right preparation, an average skilled speaker can produce 1250 to 1500 words.

On the other hand, if you’re writing everything by hand and you can only type 25 words per minute, we’re looking at something close to an hour to produce the same amount that you did when talking for 10 minutes.

Quite a big difference, right?

Well, it gets even worse. You also have to factor in editing, analysis paralysis, and perfectionism when writing things out by hand. In practical terms, it’s probably going to take you an hour and a half to maybe even three hours.

Which would you rather have? Speak for 10 minutes or slave over your keyboard stressing every word for over three hours? I’m sure the choice is obvious to you.

How can you make more money by dictating your content instead of manually writing them out?

If you get paid the standard American content rate of 5 US cents per word, you can easily make THREE TIMES your income.

How?  Let’s say you type at the rate of 30 words per minute. This means you can belt out 1800 words per hour.

If, after editing, you’re left with 1200 words, your effective per hour productivity is 1200 words per hour.

Taking some time off for research and prep work, this means you produce around 600 words per hour.

That’s an effective $30 per hour rate.

What if you dictated at a rate of 120 words per minute? You triple your income to $90 per hour!

Even better: since you’re dictating to boost your word output, you can more effectively compete with global writers who charge at little as 10 cents per word!

Check out how I am able to write 20,000 words per day – click here – [Update: I’m up to 20,000 to 35,000 words per day now]

Reason #2: Push yourself to think clearly right from the beginning

One of the most common mistakes bloggers make is to sit down with a fuzzy idea of what they are going to talk about. They might have a topic in mind, but it’s not really clear and defined.

So, they end up writing a lot of gibberish and then deleting that. They then come up with something a little bit clear and then deleting that again, until they find something solid enough to build the blog post on. By the time they’re done, they may have written several blog posts worth of materials, but they only end up with one post.

You won’t have that problem when you dictate your blog post. You force yourself at the outset to be as clear as possible about the materials you are going to talk about.

You don’t get stuck in this paralyzing pattern of thinking through ideas, refining them, and then erasing all their versions before finally getting to the version that you like. Instead, you develop enough mental discipline to be as clear about the final product you expect from your dictation process.

Reason #3: Write tighter and more effective outlines

Since you need tight parameters to avoid repeating the same topics, you are forced to write outlines that get straight to the many different points you want to address in your blog post. This leads to less fluff.

You don’t play the very common blogger game of saying the same thing in many different ways. When you look at your outline, you can see that each point that you’re going to cover is distinct from each other. You also become more economical with the words you use to make each point.

Reason #4: Cut down on rambling

A lot of bloggers think they’ll make great headway when they just write everything at the top of their heads. Using a stream of consciousness approach, you just write everything that comes to mind regarding a specific topic. Then you let the editing process sort everything out.

The problem with this is you often end up going down one rabbit hole after another.

You write a lot of materials, then you find one slightly unrelated topic very interesting. So, you explore that a little bit more and you end up with a piece that is really fragmented.

There are lots of great bits and pieces, but the whole is not cohesive. It doesn’t have enough meat to stand on its own. So, you slash away at the lesser-developed stuff and what you end up with is an unpolished mess that you still have to add to in order to publish.

This is just a roundabout of saying that you wasted all that time rambling. You lacked focus, so you didn’t end up drilling down on the key points you decided to focus on at the outset.

Reason #5: Quit second-guessing yourself

One of the things that I hate about manually writing my blog post is that I get this sneaking suspicion that a lot of the earlier stuff that I wrote in the post isn’t all that good. So I end up re-reading those materials and rewriting them.

Maybe I would take a little off here and there, or I would reorganize everything. Then I would jump to the point where I stopped and try to resume. I keep repeating this over and over and I find myself in this loop where I think I’m polishing whatever I’m writing.

What’s really happening is I’m just going around in circles and failing to achieve much of anything because I end up dissatisfied with the final product. You are your own worst critic and when you write things manually, it’s too easy to second guess yourself and end up slogging your way through.

This wastes a tremendous amount of time, and most importantly, emotional energy. You want to write when the idea is crystal clear in your mind. But when you keep second-guessing yourself or editing yourself, that once bright idea starts to fade.

Reason #6: Stop writing in circles

One of the most common patterns bloggers find themselves stuck in, is when they go through earlier sections of their blog post and get inspired to add more materials. They keep adding until they realize that they need to finish the piece.

The blog post becomes uneven, too heavy, or simply overdeveloped near the beginning, but shallow and weak everywhere else. To compensate, a lot of bloggers would go back to these other sections and repeat the process.

Instead of only taking an hour to produce a blog post, they end up blowing several hours over the week. When everything is said and done, they’re still not all that happy with the final product. This is due to the fact that they’ve been writing in circles. Which really has no direction, in terms of quality and depth.

Reason #7: Get rid of Analysis Paralysis

When you write in circles, the worst thing that you can do is to get stuck in the mindset that you need more research for one particular point. You know where that leads to, right?

The moment you get on Google, you find out some information. Then you are triggered to research other sub-topics which leads to even more sub-topics. Before you know it, you’ve been spending most of your time researching and not enough time taking notes, much less writing.

At the back of your mind, you think you’re working. However, what you’re really doing is you’re trying to find an excuse not to do any actual writing. Welcome to analysis paralysis.

It’s a mental game you play with yourself to appear busy but fail to achieve any real work. Getting stuck in analysis paralysis is a sure-fire way of destroying your productivity and killing your motivation. A lot of otherwise productive and smart bloggers fail because of analysis paralysis.

Reason #8: Get everything down in ONE take!

So how exactly does dictation fix all the issues that I just described? Well, it all boils down to the fact that when you’re dictating your blog post, you just give yourself one take. Either you got everything down or you didn’t.

You just do it and then you move on. Will you produce perfect blog posts when you start? Of course not. This takes some time to get right.

Oftentimes, you get your audio transcribed and then you sit down and edit out the fluff. Pretty soon, you start taking mental notes. When you dictate, you just focus on the stuff that counts and leave everything else out. It takes a bit of time to get there, but you will eventually get there as long as you keep dictating and editing the transcript.

Reason #9: Defeat crippling perfectionism

I remember when I first started blogging. I had all these fantasies of my blog becoming the go-to destination of people looking for the latest and greatest information about my niche.

I had this idea that all my posts have to be perfect. They have to be complete, comprehensive, thorough, and useful to everybody. As you can well imagine, I took a lot of time agonizing over my posts. Stuff that could’ve been done in two hours, I was spending several days on.

By the time I was ready to sell my blog, I realized that I actually only have a handful of posts. That’s all I was able to manage. This is because I was deathly afraid about the quality of my content. Everything had to be perfect. Sadly, I didn’t get much money for my blog.

Don’t get me wrong, the buyer thought that the content was awesome and the traffic showed a lot of promise. The problem is, there simply wasn’t enough content, thanks to my crippling perfectionism.

When you dictate your blog post, one of the first things you need to let go is the idea that everything you say must be perfectly on point. You mentally learn how to let that go. You start to emotionally accept that there may be some flaws in what you say, but as long as you edit, things will be smooth enough. Leave it at that level and you’d be surprised as to how much more productive you will be.

Reason #10: Produce content you can convert into many formats

When you’re dictating your blog posts, don’t just focus on the text it could be transcribed to. As awesome as your blog posts may be, the audio that you’ve been recording can easily be turned into a video. You can also upload it directly to audio platforms and start your own podcast show. You can even turn some of the text transcriptions into slideshows. Finally, you can hire graphic artists to take some of the graphics that you used with your transcribed blog post and turn them into infographics. You can then post this on Pinterest.

The awesome thing about repurposing or formatting your content in many different ways is that you get traffic. You can get traffic from the different platforms that cater to these content formats. You can get traffic to your blog from YouTube because you created a video. You can get traffic from search engines because of the text of your blog post. You can also get traffic from podcast listeners, thanks to your audio. I can go on and on.

Reason #11: Improve your speaking voice

When you’re dictating your blog content, you have to speak clearly enough for the transcriber to get your words right the first time around. This is a tremendous benefit. Why?

You learn how to pronounce your words more clearly. You also learn how to speak with the right emphasis so they don’t miss certain key phrases. By learning how to modulate your voice so you can dictate more effectively, you learn enough passive voice modulation skills. This can help you become a more effective communicator when you’re speaking in front of a crowd or communicating one on one.

Reason #12: Push yourself to TRULY know your stuff

If you’re bluffing or you’re kind of unclear as to what you’re going to write about, it’s going to take a much longer time to write.

You end up wasting time having to research your stuff over and over again.

When you’re dictating, you are pushed to know enough about what you’re going to be writing about so you can finish everything in one take.

There is no do-over.

You can’t delete the audio file over and over again until you come up with something that you like. You do everything in one take.

This pushes you to know enough about the stuff you choose to talk about. This leads to higher and higher levels of expertise. It’s not going to happen overnight. But dictating your materials pushes you harder and faster to become some sort of expert sooner, rather than later.

Reason #13: Focus more on research instead of production

This is my favorite benefit from dictating blog posts. Since I know that I can produce a certain amount of words for every minute I spend talking, I can devote a lot more time into researching the ideas that I’ll be talking about.

The more information I find and the more I can make sense of them so I can speak about them clearly, the greater the value my blog posts bring to the table. After all, when people read blog posts, they’re looking for solutions or information they don’t already know.

The more research you put into your content, the higher its value. Dictating your materials enables you to convert the time that you would otherwise spend writing things out by hand into research time.

If you’re still on the fence trying to decide whether to dictate your blog posts or not, keep in mind the 13 reasons above. If you want to be a more effective, efficient, and productive blogger, start dictating today.

You don’t have to dictate everything. Just start with small pieces. Get comfortable with the process. Pretty soon, you will start becoming more efficient. And if you keep it up, you’ll reach the point where the idea of writing things by hand won’t even enter your mind. Happy blogging.