What is speed blogging?

In an age where Content is King, getting those words on the page is just as important as what words you choose. Yes, your readers will demand more and more content as you become popular. This even caused one mommy blogger to quit, because the expectations of blogging became too much. We’d all like that problem, right?

So what happens when your idea well runs dry?

A little while back I gifted you 81 Blog Post Ideas but even with such an exhaustive list you’re still likely to be wanting more. So today I’m taking a look at speed blogging and what opportunities exist for your blog.

What is speed blogging?

Speed Blogging is a new term that’s just been coined to represent the fast curation of list posts that bloggers frequently use. Of course the idea of speed blogging has been around for a long time, it just meant something different in the past.

Old Approach: Sitting at your computer and giving yourself a set period of time in which to create, edit and publish a blog post. Hence, the name speed blogging was born and that was essentially it, blogging really quickly.

New Approach: In more recent times Speed Blogging has become the art of pulling together a collection of blog posts into one single post. Think of a speed blogger as being an aggregator of things. And the most common type of blog post that a speed blogger creates is a list post.

Yes, speed blogging is just a quick way to put your content rich list posts together.  An example of a website using lists posts effectively is makeuseof.com. They even use list posting to great effect with Affiliate product reviews.

How can speed blogging help your blog?

As mentioned earlier ‘Content is King’ and the more content your blog spurts out, the more Google traffic is likely to end up on your door-step. Notice how I never mentioned it had to be quality content either. And yes, I’ve seen some fairly ordinary blogs out there, whose sole purpose is for traffic generation and display advertising.

For the rest of us there is still hope.

You see speed blogging does have a place for the conventional blogger who regularly spends time scouring the Internet for the good stuff and wants to share this goodness with their readers. Think of is as a ‘best of the web’ or ‘top 10’ styled blog post.

Yes, Speed Blogging usually ends up as a list post and we are all likely to be guilty of doing one of those at some stage during our blogging career, especially when time is short and you just have to get something out the door.

Speed Blogging is perfect for curating those lists and although it falls in a bit of a grey area, just remember every link back to the original content is a plus for those bloggers, even if they don’t know it. Oh, and that ‘grey area’ I mentioned borders on scraping content for reuse on your own blog, but it is a fine line. Large news sites get away with this on a daily basis, but protect themselves with the ‘Editorial Use Only’ disclaimer.

Morally I can accept an image being linked from a bloggers post and a corresponding credit link, but I draw the line at saving an image on your servers for use within your blog content. That is blatant Copyright Infringement and should be avoided at all costs because it will eventually bite you in the butt.

Now rather than be angry with a Speed Blogger, consider maximising the link back by ensuring you have a solid call to action on that linking page. You goal is to keep the traffic on your blog once there. Also this new craze is justification to watermarking your images so you branding is spread far and wide.

What software is available to help you speed blog?

Speed Blogging Chrome Extension

Yes, the Speed Blogging Chrome Extension is like Pinterest for Bloggers. It allows the user to easily bookmark content from the web and automatically curate a list styled post in WordPress.

This custom application manages this by capturing images and the source of content throughout the internet, like facebook, twitter, youtube etc. Once you’ve captured the information you can add your own blog commentary to make the post unique and within minutes rather than hours you’ll have curated posts ready to go.

It’s very impressive software and I’m surprised it’s taken so long for something like this to be available for bloggers. If you’re thinking of trying speed blogging then you need the right tools for the job so grab a limited trial and take this one for a test run.

Press This Plugin

Similary ‘Press This’ allows for content curation at the click of a button although somewhat more cumbersome than the ‘Speed Blogging Chrome Extension’ previously mentioned.

Press This uses bookmarklets to capture highlighted data and saves it directly into your WordPress post, although you can actually publish a post within the plugin.

Press This is limited to capturing information from a single post, so clearly does not have the list creation power of ‘Speed Blogging’

<Update: ‘Press This’ has now been merged into the core WordPress source code from version 4.2.0. yay!>

Conclusion

Speed Blogging might not be for everyone and it’s so new people are still trying to identify the benefits of being targetted  by a speed blogger. So be warned not all website owners will appreciate the link back, especially if you are ranking higher than them in search rankings for a similar search term.

Google have been scraping content for years and curate this in a user readable form, which actually deters the reader from clicking through to the original website because they may have already found the information they need. Sports results and word definitions are a couple of examples that quickly come to mind.

So if your readers are time constrained and aren’t looking for in-depth commentary then speed blogging may have just found a place in your blog.

Start with a weekly post to see the sort of reaction you get and always remember this isn’t your content so ensure full accreditation is given back to the source of the material.

I don’t believe this is a fad that’s going away anytime soon, and to be honest I think the time sensitive audiences likes being able to learn something within a few minutes, rather than reading through a lengthy blog post. Of course if they do, then they are only one link away from your juicy content.

I’d like to hear if you’ve had any experience being a speed blogger or are a disgruntled blogger wishing that speed blogging would just go away.