I always tell people that I am the most left-brained marketer I know. I love organizing things, crunching numbers, and using spreadsheets. Sure, I love creativity and content creation, but I wasn’t reciting poetry when I was three years old. My ability to create content came from frameworks and practice.
All too often, I find that people give up on marketing their businesses or themselves because they don’t think they can create good content. Newsflash: anyone can create good content with the right strategies and practice. Here’s some advice to get started:
- Write in a journal every day. Instead of writing in a paper journal, though, write in a Word Doc on your computer. Set a timer for ten minutes and write on any topic you want. Can’t think about what to write about? That’s what prompts are for. Here’s an old blog entry where I give you ~50 prompts to start with, but there are a lot of writing prompt books and websites out there too. If you pick prompts related to your business or brand, you’ll probably find that you write some pretty good stuff in some of your journal entries that can later be converted to social media posts or video scripts.
- Say it instead. Simply your phone in selfie mode and video yourself talking about whatever you’d like to write. Then, upload it into Rev.com and have it transcribed for a dollar a minute. You can then edit the transcript yourself or run it through an AI tool to trim the extra “ums” and clean up punctuation and grammar. If English isn’t your first language, I especially like this approach.
- Repurpose content you’ve already written. You can do this by sharing a new example, new viewpoint, or asking people a question related to a concept you’ve already posted about online. Remember, we THINK our audience sees everything we post but we’re lucky if they see a post every once in a while. Going back and reviewing is not only a good habit to be in but it ensures you don’t waste content either.
- Just write. I can’t stress enough that we use different parts of our brain to edit and to write. Wriitng uses the creative (right) side of our brain and editing uses the left side. If you switch back and forth, it’s a sure recipe for frustration. Try not to care if you make a mistake or think of a new way to say something and just keep going. This might even mean typing the same sentence in a different way back-to-back, that’s okay! If you just keep writing, not only will you keep your creativity flowing, but you will finish the task sooner and be more satisfied with the process.
I can’t wait to see all the content you start churning out!
