How to Write Faster: 7 Speed Boosters for Freelance Writers

If you’re anything like me, you didn’t get into freelance writing because you wanted to toil away in front of your keyboard all the time.

No, you became a freelance writer because you had a lot of things you wanted to enjoy in life — friends, family, travel, and hobbies. You wanted the freedom and flexibility that freelancing provides.

But, there may be something stopping you — your writing.

It’s slow.

You’ve got work, clients coming in, and you’re spending all your time typing, and you’re struggling to get the speed up.

You want to do more, take on more clients, and make more money, and write faster without losing quality.

So how do you learn how to write faster?

Keep reading. We’ve got some tips to help you learn to write quickly.

Writing Hacks: How to Write Faster Without Losing Quality

And if you prefer a video, click below to watch:

1) Plan Ahead

A big reason that you may struggle with writing quickly could be that you don’t do a very good job of planning. The more organized you are in the beginning when you sit down to write, the easier it’s going to be to start typing.

That means planning ahead.

I recommend a couple of things:

• Create a folder for every client: Include their style guide, client info, and notes you’ve taken about their feedback on tone, key terms, competitors, and links you can or can’t use.
• Save key resources: Create another folder for researching your niche or topic. Include white papers, studies, and great resources that you consistently refer to. For research, I love a site like Perplexity, which pulls tons of data quickly.

Just doing these can save you a ton of time.

Instead of sitting around trying to find data that backs up stats you want to use in your post, you’ve got a whole pile of papers in links that have the data there.

If you have a few key pieces of data you use frequently, make a doc in your research folder summarizing key statistics. Then, it’s as simple as copying and pasting that info and links in your post.

We have a whole video on how researching can help you write faster. These go hand-in-hand.

2) Create Templates for Clients

Once you’ve set up your client folder, you can add all sorts of time-saving information, including content templates.

Most clients rehash the same types of posts. You may have to write listicles, ultimate guides, or Q&As frequently.

If you do, then create templates for each style of post.

When you do that ahead of time, it’s so much easier to write quickly. You’ve got the basic outline of your needs, so you don’t have to think about that. Now, all you have to do is plug in your research.

Here’s a little writing hack for your templates. When you copy your template into a new doc, add this at the top:

• A couple of different headlines: If you have to provide them.
• A few keywords: Your client may give you one or two, but use a premium SEO tool like Semrush or a free tool like Keywords Everywhere to add more keywords relevant to your client and work them into the content.
• Internal links to add to the post: Pick 3-5 links from your client’s site to add to your post.

These may seem small, but trust me, your clients will love them. Doing keyword research and adding links ahead of time can help speed up your writing process.

If you do just the first two of these, you will speed up dramatically.

But let’s keep digging into a few more tips for understanding how to write faster.

3) Remove Distractions

This one may be the most important (it is for me, at least). And that’s removing distractions.

The biggest thing that slows down my writing is distractions. I’ve got 1,000 tabs open, push notifications, texts, emails, you name it. It doesn’t take much for me to lose my flow.

So, I have to take active steps to redirect my focus from the other stuff and back to writing.

The first step is to identify the distractions that derail you. Everyone’s different, but I’d bet that a combination of your phone, social media, and emails is a big chunk of your problems.

The only place where I can work distraction-free is probably in the middle of the desert.

But most of the time? I solve these by putting on my noise-canceling headphones, going to the Spotify Peaceful Piano playlist, closing unnecessary tabs, and turning on focus mode on all my devices.

That’s going to remove about 95% of my distractions.

If I’m home, I may light a candle to make the atmosphere a bit homier. I’ll grab a coffee when I’m out at a coffee shop or co-working space.

All those routines signal to my brain that it’s time to work.

4) Embrace outlining

Is it time to write yet?

Not quite.

We’ll get there — I promise.

The next step is my secret weapon: outlining.

Having your template and research ahead of time will massively help with this. Before you type a word, you’re already a chunk of the way there.

I know the points I want to make, and I’ve laid out my headings and key points. Next, I go through my template and fill it out with bullet points.

I’ll add the topics I want to cover in my stats, keywords, and where it’s best to link to those other internal client articles. Doing all this can help you review the flow of your post and ensure you’re providing data and backup information that hits all the points you want to make.

I make a detailed outline, which probably gets me about 90% of the way there. When it’s time to finish the post, I can bang out the rest pretty quickly because I’ve already done all the heavy lifting.

5) Use AI Tools to Defeat the Blank Page

The blank page has beaten many aspiring freelance writers.

I’ve been there, believe me. It’s an easy way to get derailed and slow down the entire writing process.

But here’s the good news: many ways to get past the blank page today exist — AI writing tools can be a major help. No, AI isn’t a dirty word, they are some of the best tools out there to help you speed up your processes.

If you want something really simple, try one of these writing prompts.

Now, with AI writing tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Content at Scale, there’s no excuse to get stuck staring at a blank page. All you have to do is ask it a question about your topic or tell it to give you ten headlines and ideas and even generate a basic outline, and then you’re off to the races.

Once you’ve got that info to help get you started, getting more ideas and refining them is easy. And, if you get great at prompt engineering for these tools, use them to create an outline for you and then build around that.

Just make sure you keep your personality and voice in there. Your creativity and personality will continue to set you apart as a writer. You don’t want to have the computer do everything for you.

6) Learn to Batch

The last thing you can do to improve your writing speed is to batch your work.

If you cover several different niches or topics, batching can really help you focus and overcome distractions.

For me, I have my golf business, Location Rebel, and a cocktail site (among many other distractions). So if I’m trying to write an outline or shoot a video for LR, then come up with some golf topics or test out cocktail recipes, I’m bouncing between them a lot.

When I switch between these worlds, it’s easy to get distracted and lose focus.

That’s why I started to batch. I focus on one business at a time.

With freelancing, let’s say you write about car insurance for one client and home improvement for another. Rather than switching between them, write all the articles for one client in a batch.

To make it easy, make it a 2-3 day process.

• Day 1: Do all your research for your car insurance articles and fill in the outlines
• Day 2: Write your car insurance articles.
• Day 3: Review and edit your car insurance articles.

This way, you’re locked into this topic, and it’s so much easier to get into a flow, remove distractions, and avoid constantly switching gears.

7) Start With Small Wins

That’s the larger-scale strategy for learning how to write faster, but there are a few more tactical hacks you can do to improve your speed.

But I also understand that sometimes you just want some small wins to help you gain momentum. So, let’s cover a few of these.

• Write every day: The best way to get better at writing is to write more often. Start with something you can do every day; maybe that’s 100 words, and the topic doesn’t matter. Here’s how to start a daily writing habit.
• Set a timer: What I love about using the timer is that you’re training your brain to think faster. It’s going to help you both type faster and think faster, and over time, that’s a really valuable skill.
• Use online tools: Finally, work on your typing speed. Take a speed test to get a baseline. Then, use a tool like Typing Academy or Typing Tutor to improve your speed.

Learning how to write faster is a skill, and if you’re a freelancer, it’s an important one. But that means you have to work on it actively.

Now You Know How to Write Faster. The Rest is Up to You…

Start implementing these skills, and your writing will speed up quickly. As you get into your processes, see what works and then tweak.

It may take some time, but finding the systems and workflows that work for you can help you take on more in less time.

You’ve got this.

This post was updated in September 2024 for more accuracy.

Sean Ogle

Sean Ogle is the Founder of Location Rebel where he has spent the last 12+ years teaching people how to build online businesses that give them the freedom to do more of the things they like to do in life. When he's not in the coffee shops of Portland, or the beaches of Bali, he's probably sneaking into some other high-class establishment where he most certainly doesn't belong.