Writing at the Speed of Light.

This is a practice thing. You get faster with practice. Heh. You're also working too hard for blog posts for a marketing agency. They'll be three times as impressed if you do half as good a job but do it twice as fast.

http://www.metafilter.com/106423/Writing-Faster Oh and the Slate article seems to've moved. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_browser/2011/08/slowpoke.html.

Important question: how long are the posts supposed to be? After a few months into my professional blogging career (ha! but yeah, really,) I could get through a solid, info- and link-filled post (300 words) in about 45 minutes-1.5 hours, and I was doing one or two a day. If you're doing five a day, your goal should be to constantly trim them down. This is pretty hard if, like me, you're a painstaking writer, and if, in your desire to provide valuable info, you're also striving to be thorough. Keeping things as absolutely concise as you can is great on all fronts--less research is required, it takes less time to write, and frankly, people generally don't read lengthy stuff anyway. The other thing that helped me was to sit down in advance and make a big list of catchy titles to use throughout the week. "Our Favorite Uses of Yellow in Home Office Decor", "3 Easy Steps to Reduce Eye Strain", etc, etc. It makes things go a lot faster if you don't have to come up with the idea on the spot and it gives your research focus. All of these help speed up the process of actually producing the post. Lastly, instead of making a post about the best events in your city when such listings already exist, why not make a post that's a roundup of the listings? "Best Resources to Find Fun Events in City X" or what have you. "Listicles" like that can be really useful to people Googling down the road, if you really do find the good stuff (rather than just using it as a filler post).

I used to supervise blogging interns, and my first thought is 600 words for a blog post? That's really long! For the type of stuff you're describing, I'd say 200-300 words is a much more reasonable range. But, one of the best ways to get faster is to cut out the time you spend thinking about how to organize your information. Look at well-written blogs in your industry, or really at any popular, high-volume blog (Buzzfeed, or any of the Gawker Media empire) and you'll notice that most posts fall into half a dozen categories: news items, product reviews, top X lists, link roundups, talk in the comments about controversial topic X, tips and tricks...it's very easy to spot the formulas that are relevant to your industry once you start looking. Then, every week you come up with 3-5 ideas that fall into each of the formula categories, and writing a post becomes more like filling out a Mad Libs and less like writing a term paper. Also, FWIW, 300 words an hour would make you what I would consider a very efficient writer, and 7 hours a day is pretty much the maximum of writing time anyone I've met can handle without being on the fast track to burnout. If they're really expecting more than 2000 words of copy a day, I would suspect that either a) they don't have a ton of experience doing this and have slightly unreasonable expectations, b) it's an extremely high-turnover position or c) they've developed some sort of secret productivity formula that they should be teaching you.

You need to get on a mailing list or email blast list for various events--most cities have some sort of master calendar--hook up with some local PR firms, and your inbox will be flooded with this stuff (make a separate email address for this.) Using a word from a press release or source is not a big deal. If you're going to be a paid blogger, you need to be able to distill a press release down to the essential elements quickly. Don't agonize over your prose--make each word count, and include the usual--who, where, when, what and why. No one will care if your top ten list is the same as another top ten list. But reach out to PR firms and let them come to you. I've been a paid blogger, and speed and timely updates are what keep your content fresh and get you hits. 2.5 posts a day isn't going to do it, as I'm sure you know. Most of the time, you don't need to rewrite and rewrite--dash it off, polish it and post. It's not like writing an essay for creative lit 101. Find your own voice--write like you talk--and after a while, you'll be able to pound these posts out without a lot of agony.

Initially the minimum word count was 600, which I really struggled with at first because I tend toward the concise side. But recently the company head told us that the number of words don't matter--as long as it gets the message across.

To clarify, not everything I write about has to do with events--that's just one example. It really just depends on what the client's focus is. But to answer some of your suspicions, psycheslamp, it's a pretty new company, so a) is true; b} has yet to be seen--I'm their first intern, and they recently offered to let me bump up to full-time. I really want to be a religion reporter, so I'm wondering if I should put that goal on the backburner for awhile and focus on this, since I have some student debt to pay off, it will help me write faster and hey, it's not food service! But then again, the kind of writing I do for the company--especially at such a rapid (well, for me anyways) pace--is not the kind of thing I would ever include in a portfolio. Eventually they'd like me to write 12,000 words a week, but they said to start I would tentatively be expected to produce 7,000 and work my way up. Should I go full-time, or keep at it part-time and start building up some journalism experience somewhere else? Part of my problem is that I don't feel really excited about marketing. But I don't have a marketing background, so maybe once I learn more about it, I'll become more invested in it. I don't know what I should do.

Learning to write fast, clear and on deadline is good training for any kind of reporter. If you stick with this, you've got samples to show editors. I'd look for free-lance opportunities while you're blogging about a marketing firm, and then grow from there--you can still investigate religious events and congregations, etc., in your spare time. Plenty of full-time writers have sprung from writing blog posts, marketing copy and so on. And trust me--not every journalist is excited about every single story. Part of being a pro is writing well anyway.