6 Sure-Fire Ways to Beat Writer's Block
All content creators will have experienced the same sinking feeling of facing a white screen, a flashing cursor, a looming deadline and no inspiration. Rather than banging your head against the keyboard, wouldn’t it be great to beat that writer’s block once and for all? Here are some of our top tips.
Creating engaging and relevant content is a constant hurdle for marketers to overcome. Content marketing is a great method to reach and resonate with an audience as well as improving your website’s SEO rankability. Unfortunately, there is no button for content marketing and it requires consistent planning, content creation and reviewing.
It's certain that all content creators will have experienced the same sinking feeling of facing a white screen, flashing cursor, looming deadline and no inspiration. Wouldn’t it be great to beat that writer’s block once and for all? Here are some of our top tips.
1. Recent Successes
There’s no shame in bragging about any victories (or sharing defeats) that you’ve gone through. These highlight experience - both good and bad - and sharing setbacks as well as successes shows a level of brand transparency that some companies may be afraid of.
Whether you want to show off a new service or product in your offering, or share some exciting team or client news, these milestones are good examples of content which doesn't require much time or effort to research. After all, drawing from first hand experience always makes it easier to write about.
2. Today’s Date
Success in content marketing doesn’t always require a 5 star writer and you don’t always have to look too far for inspiration. When a significant date or holiday is coming up, why not use it to inform the content you post. Is there an industry-specific or local event that your audience would benefit from knowing about?
These can make for some great topics to share on social media, construct a blog post around or create an attention-grabbing email to draw not only your existing audience, but also a new stream of traffic searching for these holidays.
3. Always Changing
Many industries go through constant changes and transitions. Keeping up with these is not only important to help your business stay ahead of the trend and become an authority in your field, but these changes also often make for effective content.
By being one of the first to jump on changes or new trends within your industry or offering an original point of view, it shows your audience that you listen to the noise and are prepared to take on changes. As a result, when something new hits the industry, people will start to anticipate your response.
4. Pick a Theme
Creating a content calendar can help to organise your thoughts and keep content relevant. Blogs and social feeds which remain on topic and up-to-date are often the most successful. This is easy enough to replicate by picking themes on a monthly basis, for example. Having these themes in place is a good technique for scatterbrained marketers, who jump from one idea to the next. It allows you to stay on track with what content you are writing and can often inspire new content that you might not have considered before.
What’s more, introducing themes to your content marketing strategy means that all your content, over your blog, website and social feeds will be streamlined and on topic, making it easier for new and existing audiences to get to know your company’s positioning on a range of topics.
5. Listen Up
The true aim of content marketing boils down to brand awareness and attracting new traffic to your website through the medium of content. With this in mind, it seems foolish to ignore what your customers and clients are saying. Their feedback can sometimes help shape and inform the content you create.
Keep an eye and an ear out for what your audience is talking about. If there is a sudden buzz around an industry relevant trend, then it’s probably worth creating some content around it. Try it out - you might be shocked at the traffic you attract with this type of content.
6. Forget the Intro
So, you’re one of the lucky ones. You’ve been struck with some inspiration and you’ve just got the task ahead. It’s easy to lose motivation when trying to word a perfect introduction. Instead, dive straight into the meat of the blog/website page/post or whatever it is you’re writing. After all, it’s much easier to introduce what you’ve written about once you know what you’ve actually written.
Initial ideas are often the most valuable, so getting these down on the page will help free up some thinking space for crafting that elusive introduction. Not only that, but it eliminates the initial fear of the blank page.
As good a writer as you may be, nobody can avoid writer's block every once in a while. Here's a little bonus tip... Don't worry about being perfect. Nobody is. The most important thing to beat that writer's block is to get something down on the page. The rest can come later.
If you're looking for advice about your content marketing strategy, contact the team at Colewood Internet.