Writing an Ultimate Guide isn’t easy.

Even with the right support, it can take MONTHS to get one written – and many people get stuck in their perfectionism and never finish it.

Over the past few months, I worked with my 1on1 client Matej on creating his Ultimate Guide about “How to Find More Time and Energy to Start an Online Business”.

I’m super proud of all the work that he’s put into the guide, and it’s a really incredible piece of content.

After he finished writing the guide, Matej reached out to me and shared with me a few key lessons that he learned from writing his first guide, that he will use to write his next Ultimate Guide in half the time.

I absolutely loved these lessons because they show the other side of writing really exceptional content that very few people talk about.

I loved how Matej openly shared the mistakes that he made, as well as the specific ways in which he will avoid them next time – so I decided to share them on my blog.

If you’re thinking about (or in the process of) writing your first Ultimate Guide, this is a must read.

Matej, take it away :).

Matej’s mistakes and key takeaways from writing his first 25k word ultimate guide

In late December 2016 I started working on a bigger project for my side business – writing an ultimate guide “How to Find More Time and Energy to Start an Online Business”.

I knew it does not have to necessarily be a huge project lasting for months. However, I wanted to make it great, highly valuable for my readers for the years to come so I wanted to put a lot of effort into it.

With the demanding full-time job and two small kids at home (2 and 5 year old) I knew it’s going to be a challenge but exciting one. I wanted to write an Ultimate Guide for months but was always avoiding it.

Suddenly, my mentor Primoz Bozic shifted his business to helping people writing Ultimate Guides and I’ve become one of his first 1on1 clients. So we started working together.

Expected time frame for publishing the guide was 2-3 months.

I was very excited to make it happen.

Looking back, it has been 5 months until I finally published my Ultimate Guide.

I know I could have published my guide a lot faster, and now I know exactly how to write and publish my next Ultimate Guide in half the time.

Today I want to share with you the biggest mistakes I’ve made while writing my first Ultimate Guide and the key takeaways from the process that you can use to successfully write your first Ultimate Guide without spending 5 months on it like I did.

Mistake #1: I tried to make the Table of Contents too perfect

When Primoz and I started working together, things went really well. I had a lot of my free time since there was a Christmas holiday, and I didn’t need to go to work.

I spent most of that time jumping on calls with a few of my readers and friends to narrow down and validate my idea for the Ultimate Guide.

Validating my business idea by talking to people had always been tough for me, but finally I’ve managed to do it and it was actually a ton of fun.

Not only did those calls help me with my idea, but I’ve also aimed to add massive value to those people as well.

Every time I jumped on a call with someone to help me with the idea, I also offered to help them out with any questions they would have about finding more time and energy to work on their side business.

As I did that, one of the readers loved my help so much that he wanted to work with me.

That’s how I landed my first ever client from my side business:

Once I was confident about the idea I’ve started working on the Table of Contents.

The first draft was done pretty fast, but then I hit a roadblock.

I was not sure if it’s great enough. And because I wanted to make it perfect I was tweaking the Table of Contents for about two weeks.

I went back to the people that helped me validate the idea for my guide and asked them to give me feedback on my Table of Contents.

The problem was that I needed to wait for them to get back to me, then incorporate their feedback, and repeat the process over and over again.

This lead me to procrastinating on my guide because I did not feel like working on it again and again. There were quite a few days when I was not working on it at all because I did not feel like it.

Luckily, Primoz stopped me from further procrastination and told me that my Table of Contents was good enough to move forward.

I spent just one more day polishing the final version of the Table of Contents by jumping on Skype calls with two friends who helped me finalize it right on the spot in the way I was confident that it’s great.

Here’s what the final version of the Table of Contents looked like:

What I’ll do differently next time:

After writing the first draft of the Table of Contents, I’ll get on a call with 1-3 of my ideal readers and go through it live together.

It’s much easier and faster for both parties than waiting for people to leave you comments in the google doc. It’s also much better talking through what they think about the guide and how they feel about it.

Together, we can easily tweak some of the headlines to make them more compelling and find the right order of the chapters so the guide flows well.

I won’t spend more than one week on the Table of Contents because I know it will lead to procrastination and doubts if it’s great or not.

I’ll spend a week on it, make it good enough, and then make further changes as I’m writing the guide if I need to.

Mistake #2: I bit off more than I could chew

As soon as I completed my Table of Contents, I knew that the guide would be huge.

I knew that because I always write very long posts where I try to explain everything in detail to give as much value to my readers as possible.

I thought that was OK since I wanted my guide to be really great, and the best piece of content on the internet on that topic.

However, looking back and seeing that this was my first ever Ultimate Guide, I would probably split the guide into a few smaller topics.

This way, I’d cover just one specific topic in great detail (like how to find the energy to work on your side business after you come home from work), and write a guide that’s about 10k words long instead of going for that 25k beast:

Doing this would help me create the guide two or three times faster, and I’m sure it would also be easier to keep the momentum while writing my guide.

What I’ll do differently next time:

The next guide I’ll create will be about a smaller, more specific topic.

I’ll aim for something like 7-12k words with it, and focus on getting it out there faster.

If you’re planning on writing your first guide, I encourage you to start small too.

You want to test how Ultimate Guides resonate with your audience andlearn how to create them while having fun.

You don’t want to spend months figuring things out or getting lost in the process, especially if you do not have anybody to hold your hand along the way.

I also encourage you to take into account what kind of a writer you are.

If you don’t have a problem with writing long posts, then it’s OK to create a longer guide. But if you tend to write shorter posts and struggle with writing really long ones, pick a guide that’s shorter and create a longer guide down the road when you’re more comfortable with it.

Mistake #3: I wrote about topics I was not too confident about

If you do a lot of research for your Ultimate Guide in the beginning, you will get a lot of feedback on what you should include in the guide.

This can be good and bad.

When I started writing my guide, I knew that mindset issues plays a huge role in our performance and achieving the results especially with business on the side.

From the feedback I’ve gotten, I saw that other people would want to learn more about solving them.

The problem for me was that I did not have proven solutions and experience with solving them. I have some good tactics which helped me, but I wasn’t too confident about giving too much advice on that topic.

However, because I really wanted to help my readers, I still wanted to write a chapter about those things to satisfy them. That’s what they told me that they want.

And we always tend to please people.

This lead me to a lot of procrastination on writing that chapter.

I did not want to start writing it because I did not have the best of ideas to write about.

Instead, I spent a lot of time researching the materials I could include in the guide. I was trying to learn more about those problems so I could better explain them in the post.

That was a big mistake, because this one chapter delayed writing the guide for a few extra weeks.

What I’ll do differently next time:

Whenever I won’t feel confident about writing about a topic that’s in my Table of contents, I’ll skip it.

I’ll remove it from the Table of Contents and perhaps revisit it down the line once I’m more confident in giving advice about it.

I know that there’s a lot more I can write about. Removing one chapter from my guide will not make or break it.

I encourage you to do the same.

As you’re writing your guide there will also be times when you’ll face the writers block or you will feel like you do not want to write about one section at the moment.

If you’ll still be confident you can write it it does not mean you have to remove it from your guide.

Just skip the chapter for a week or two and jump to the next exciting one. You can always come back later when the inspiration strikes you, or you remember those nice stories you wanted to cover in that chapter.

The most important thing when writing your Ultimate Guide is to keep your momentum going, and keep writing as much as possible in succession which will pretty much ensure that you won’t get stuck.

Mistake #4: I spent too much time editing my guide

I have to admit that my perfectionism prolonged the publishing of the guide by 2-3 months.

That’s because I wanted to make it the most epic guide which would stand out and stand the test of time.

Because I wanted to make sure this would really happen, I spent about 2 months editing the guide.

The guide has 25k words which took quite some time to go through.

As I edited the guide I was played too much with the content, grammar, styling the phrases.

Many times I’ve rewritten sentences more than 5 times to make them easier to read and more “compelling” as if I’d been writing a sales page.

There were also many sections which I thought were not good because I had written them during the sessions where I had lower energy.

I really saw the difference in the quality. And my mentality urged me to rewrite them completely.

And that’s what I did.

This added tens of hours into the process of getting the guide finished.

What I’ll do differently next time:

Next time I won’t spend so much time editing my guide.

I’ll do just one round of editing while focusing just on fixing only broken sections, things that are truly hard to understand, or things that do not fit well the guide as a whole.

I won’t try to make it perfect.

I know that the most important thing is to share my highly valuable advice with my readers.

One unclear sentence or paragraph here and there does not make a huge difference in this long piece of epic content.

What makes the true difference is the content itself.

Instead of making my next guide perfect, I’ll just focus on making it more 10x more epic than anything else out there.

Mistake #5: I tried to include every influencer I knew in the guide

I knew that I can add value to the influencers I wanted to build relationships with by mentioning them in the guide.

Especially by sharing their advice that I’ve implemented in my life. Mentioning the things that they taught that worked for me.

I wanted to spread the word about as many people as possible in my guide, and I created a huge list of people I wanted to include in it:

It was a good intention. But, it cost me many hours by browsing through the articles of influencers to find the best fit for my guide.

And while doing so I got often caught up with reading new articles and then thinking about new ideas. This took my focus away from writing the guide.

What I’ll do differently next time:

Next time, I’ll pick just a few influencers that I want to build relationships with whose advice is already a good fit for your guide.

I won’t try to include everyone, just the people who I already know and that have already helped me with their advice.

I’ll mention the influencers who made a difference in my life or life of my clients that are directly relevant to the topic I’m mentioning in the guide.

If I find myself browsing through their articles to find one that’s a good fit, I’ll skip the influencer and possibly talk about them in one of my future guides.

Mistake #6: Spending a month on my content upgrade

Working on my Ultimate Guide helped me get a lot of clarity around my business idea.

Because of that I decided to create an email course as a main opt-in carrot for my website. I would also use that free course as a content upgrade for the whole guide:

Initially, I thought it’d be easy and fast. I was really convinced and confident.

It turned out to be quite the opposite.

Again, I wanted to make it as best as possible, so it took me ton of time to write email sequence.

Not only writing it took me so much time, but setting everything up on my website and in the email service provider was a lot of work.

It was a whole new project which should have been done after publishing my guide.

This was another thing that delayed publishing my guide by another mont..

What I’ll do differently next time:

I know that creating a content upgrade is a great way to maximize my opt-ins from the ultimate guide.

However, next time I won’t spend a whole month on it and try to make it really big.

Instead I’ll create something crunchy for my readers. Something they could easily implement and will give them immediate results.

For example, I could create a quick cheat-sheet of the tactics from the guide, or a one-page worksheet that would help them implement my advice faster.

Mistake #7: I didn’t enjoy the process all the time

Probably the worst thing I was doing through this project was thinking about the outcomes of it.

I was super excited at the beginning and had a ton of fun working on my guide for the first few weeks.

But then it got into my head and I started to think about the number of subscribers, or even potential coaching clients I could get as a result of publishing the guide.

That’s why I wanted to make it perfect and was doing all of those mistakes mentioned above.

In the process I forgot to have fun with it, to enjoy those quiet early mornings, working sessions in my favorite coffee shop, or the late nights sipping the red wine.

I’ve lost the excitement because I was pushing myself to make it fast and perfect.

What I’ll do differently next time:

Next time I’ll focus on having a lot more fun with my Ultimate Guide. I’ll enjoy the process.

I’ll write about the topics that I like talking about with people. About the advice I give to my readers. And the things I thrive learning more about myself.

If you’re writing your first Ultimate Guide, the best piece of advice I can give you is to have fun with it.

You’ll learn a ton and also get a lot of experience throughout the whole project.

Don’t worry so much about the outcome, and focus on the fact that you are creating something amazing.

Want to get started with writing your first Ultimate Guide?

I hope you’ll be able to use some of this advice to successfully write your first Ultimate Guide.

If you do so, I’m sure it’ll help you create an amazing and very helpful piece of content for your readers.

While enjoying the process and having a lot of fun along.

If you want to take a look at the Ultimate Guide that I wrote, you can read the whole guide here:

How to Find More Time and Energy to Start an Online Business [The Ultimate Guide]

If you want to get access to the whole framework that Primoz and I used to help me write my first guide, make sure you read Primoz’s Ultimate Guide checklist below:

Get your FREE copy of the 13,000+ word Ultimate Guide Checklist

And if you’re guilty of making one of these mistakes yourself, share which one it is with us in the comments below.

To your success!

-Matej