How to write content when you think you are not capable of writing
How should you write about a topic in your blog or social media profile?
What I hear is the most challenging thing for people who want to develop their online presence through a blog is what to write about and how to do it. How do you present your subject, your services or your creative work in a way that doesn’t sound cliche, boring, too corporate or too relaxed?
Reflecting about a solution to this trial, I have created an exercise that might help you go past this very usual bump after you have a blog online.
It happens to everybody. It’s okay. You don’t have to feel embarassed. I get it. It’s completely normal.
Let’s get to it.
STEP #1: Have ideas
The first thing you can do is to list the things you want to communicate. Don’t worry about a perfect list. No matter how messy or unorganized, doing it will starting putting yourself in a blogging mindset that will definitely become more and more helpful as you flex this creative muscle.
I’m gonna use myself as an example, ok (specially since I need to keep it up with the posting on this blog).
Here’s what I want to tell you on the upcoming weeks:
- ideas for content on blogs
- free tools that I find useful
- images online where to find
- can i copy and paste content no
- selfies are lame not interesting
- you rock
- freedom by blogging
Be free with your thoughts: the strenght of the ideas, how you will develop them, if those are things you should keep to yourself, trying to accomplish perfect grammar… nothing like that matters at this point.
What you need to do is to find things you want to say. I’m sure there’re a lot of them right in there no matter what is your original intent.
You’ll see how easy this becomes once you start doing it. And no, maybe you shouldn’t write an exposé on that person who stood you up on fifth grade. Or maybe you do, go get that bastard.
Read also…
STEP #2: Pinpoint a mission
Fresh from this raw list of ideas, the next thing you can ty doing is thinking about what moves you about them. Answer these two questions:
- What do you want to accomplish with your writing?
- Who are you talking to?
For example: do you want to conquer new clients? Do you want to be seen as an enlightened writer? Do you want to help people? Do you want to offer them a product?
Write the answer (or plural) to that.
Back to my case: I want to help people with no previous knowledge to be free by doing things online. What’s your reason?
STEP #3: Check your tone
Are you (your persona, the company you represent, your blogging archetype) friendly and funny? Do you need to project confidence or be perceived as trustworthy? Is it a personal voice you want to bring forward or an institucional one?
This will help you always get to te best “writing voice” for you to develop in you writing.
Me: I’m a funny person (I assume) and I want to sound like your online friend who has all the answers and a couple of hard truths when you need them. Boom.
Now you have found some starting points and three columns of material. You’re guessing it correctly: it’s time to put them together to work.
See this…
STEP #4: Put one, two and three together and write!
Think about ways you can bring together one answer from each column and form cohesive sentences. Write them down, it’s an exercise (and, honestly, my first ones ever were not that great).
For example: by combining “images online where to find” + help people + funny talk, I could whip up something like…
Hey, lost people from the internet. Today, I’m gonna show you where you can get that funny cat dancing image that you desperately need for your blog for free. Here’s my favorite sources, the ones I actually use all the time!
It’s a general exercise but the idea here is to at least frame a a starting point for you to have your own thoughts somewhat organized and to start writing about them in the exact way you envision for your blog.
If you have followed my tutorial, you know that one of the challenges to make it on the blogging world by yourself is to go beyond self-imposed limitations and risk it all in favor of a free and rewarding experience. There’s (almost) no setback from that at the starting level. So why guard yourself?
Go back to all those columns and try again, this time in a different way or crossing different elements. From there, you can start drafting your first posts and working on them so they can be ready to publish. All it takes is one sentence after another.
Don’t worry, they might suck at the beginning (I know all about that), but you will get better with time. Writing is a job that never ends, with infinite things to learn and ajust, but that’s really part of the appeal.
Are you willing to try? Let me know if you find this helpful in the comments.
Did you find this helpful? Please consider sharing to hopefully inspire more new bloggers around!
See this also…
