Peter Drucker, one of the sharpest business names of our time, once said: you can’t improve what you don’t measure. This is valid for most things in life, writing included.
If you want to make money writing you need to become a prolific writer. If you want to become a prolific writer, as Druker recommends, you need to start tracking your writing output.
There is no right or wrong way to track your writing. You can use pen and paper or an online spreadsheet. You can track how many words you write per day or how many articles you write per week. Find whatever works for you but make sure that you are tracking, with numbers, how productive you are being as a writer.
Setting Goals
Tracking how many words you are writing per day is a great start but is not enough. In order to push yourself and to improve over time you also need to set goals. You should start with a number that’s reasonable and attainable for your current writing experience, and increase it over time.
For example you could start with the goal of writing 2 articles per week and over the course of 50 weeks increase it gradually until you reach the number of 14 articles per week, which is equivalent to 2 per day.
We created a sample spreadsheet here you can use to get started. You will notice that we suggest two methods for tracking your writing: words per day and articles per week. You can use the one you prefer or both. Make sure to edit the goals as well.