Sitting with a dear friend recently (experienced in his field) when he expressed his desire to be more active in business writing for social, blogs, LinkedIn etc but he was stuck because he didn’t believe he had anything to say.
So I took him through the following exercise and if you are thinking the same you may wish to play along.
- Think about an unstructured conversation you last had with a client or prospect that went on for at least an hour that felt like you were in a flow.
- In that hour, what were the main (high level) topics of conversation you covered excluding the friendly chit chat. Try and think of at least 3 categories you covered.
- In each of those categories what were the questions or concerns expressed in the conversation?
- What were your responses?
- Reflect back, how else might you have responded if you had more time to think about it?
- List everything out, adding in soundbites you wished you had said as well.
My guess is that you will have a list of at least 20 items, each of which you could flesh out and write a post or blog and that was just from a 1 hour off-the-cuff.
How many of those have you had in the last year alone?
Given the opportunity most could talk for hours on a subject they are passionate about but when asked to sit and write, “got nothin…”
Do not over complicate it, just start writing like you are answering a question or recalling a story in a conversation and you will be surprised how much starts coming out.