Updated January 11, 2023
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Dealing With Writers Block
Almost 50% of the time I spend ‘writing’ content is actually time spent thinking about what to write. With the ongoing demand to write more and more, coming up with fresh ideas is harder than actually researching and writing them. So how can you save time thinking up new ideas and avoid staring a blank page for 20 minutes every time you want to write quality cornerstone content? Here are four things I always think about when trying to write something that help me focus on a topic.
Audience
First thing’s first. Who are you writing this for? You should know before you start writing who your audience is. Are they experienced professionals? Stay at home parents? Teenagers looking for some fun? Creating a buyer’s persona is key to creating quality content. Get to know your customers as best as you can. You need to understand their pain, and then give them a solution to that pain. You can’t do that without researching them a little first.
Level of Education/ Position in the Funnel
Once you work out who you’re speaking to you need to find out what they know about you. Are they new to your company? Or new to your product? Knowing this will help you gauge the level of the content you create. You need to slowly build up the knowledge of your customers and educate them on the problem your business solves. But you can’t just jump into solving their problem before they know they have one.
You need to create content for all stages of your buyers funnel. Some content introducing the topic and more content going into greater detail. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln “You can’t please all of the people all of the time… with one blog post”. You don’t want to bore more educated leads with basic information. But you also don’t want to alienate newer leads with a bunch of acronyms that don’t make sense.
Topic
After you’ve gone through those two steps you can pick a topic you’re going to talk about. For example at Spectrum we write about a number of different services we provide and generally our blog posts could fall into any of these three categories: Content/ PPC/ SEO.
Having a set of topics decided on helps to keep your content focused on your core services and avoids you from getting stuck on a blank page. Thinking about an AdWords topic to write about is a lot easier than thinking of a digital marketing topic to write about. Focusing your attention on one area, oddly, gives you more options.
Content Structure
After you’ve picked your topic you can decide how you’re going to structure your content. Is it going to be a list post? A how to guide? An in depth study? A collection of best tips from around the web? Or just an opinion piece.
Constructing Cornerstone Content
By this point you know who you’re speaking to, how much they should know about you, your topic and how the piece is going to be structured. All that’s left is to write the thing. So, what are you doing still reading this…get writing!
Photo credit – Top: Mark Jensen
Photo credit – Bottom: Shira Gal
