So, it’s time to write your blog post. Or, at least that’s what your calendar entry says. You’ve been ignoring it all week.
It’s just so hard to write content, you think.
You never know where to start, and each week coming up with something to write about or publish feels like climbing a mountain.
In fact, you’ve missed a week or two, because, well, you just aren’t sure what your ideal client would resonate with.
It’s such a common problem and can be so painful. It can make you start to resent creating content. And for some people, it’s such a stumbling block that it pulls them out of the consistency with their marketing which is so important.
It doesn’t have to be this hard.
Coming up with a content strategy and determining your core marketing themes, ensuring they’ll resonate with your ideal clients is something I help clients with all the time. It’s a key to making content creation much, much easier. Here’s an exercise I want to give you today to get you started.
4 steps to uncovering powerful topics for your content
Find a few minutes where you’ll be able to be alone and undisturbed for this exercise. Then,grab your favorite pen and a journal and do the following.
Get Quiet
Tapping into our own inner guidance system always requires you to quiet your mind. So the first thing you need to do is to take a few minutes to breathe deeply and ground into your body. Settle in, especially if you’ve been running all morning or just hung up from a meeting or class.
Visualize an ideal client
Close your eyes and picture an ideal client. Think about who she might be and bring one specific person to mind. This could be a previous client or someone you know that you think could really benefit from the type of work you do. If applicable and you don’t have a previous client or a friend or acquaintance that could use your help, you could visualize an earlier version of yourself. Once you have decided on someone, spend a few minutes with here, visualizing where’s she’s at and what’s troubling her.
For example, let’s say you help newly sober women stay on the path to sobriety and discover what they really want out of life. You have a friend and former colleague. She’s stopped drinking a few weeks ago and says it’s been hard.
Imagine a scenario
Keeping this ideal client in mind, envision a specific scenario she might frequently experience and struggle with. Use your imagination and visualize how this situation might play out. Write down the scenario:
For example, you imagine this person struggles with what to do now with her free time. Most of her former friends are old drinking buddies and everything they want to do is centered around alcohol and drinking.
Take a deeper look
Review the scenario. What specific things might your ideal client have been thinking about or struggling with in that moment? Mull this over and extract some broad based themes, writing them down.
For example, this person might struggle with feeling lonely. She might be worried about how her friends will judge her and her new way of being in the world. Or, she might not be very good at telling her old friends about her new choices, so perhaps she makes up excuses but then feels awful about it. Maybe, she wants to try new things but be feeling scared right now. She might have no idea how to even go about finding something new she’s interested in…I could go on but you get the idea.
Each of the things you’ve written down in your list becomes a topic you can write or speak about in your upcoming articles or other content creation. To show you, here are just a few sample titles that came from the scenario, I laid out above:
“Your Friends Keep Asking You Out for Happy Hour: What To Say To Them”
“What Will They Think? Talking to Your Coworkers and Friends About Your Sobriety”
“Confronting Loneliness When You’re Newly Sober”
Figuring out what to write about can be difficult but it doesn’t have to feel impossible. If you take a few minutes to get quiet, visualize your ideal client and envision a scenario she’s working through, you can pull through the threads, creating a list of topics that will resonate with your potential clients and that you can weave into your content.
Writer’s Loft - Coworking Sessions
Are you looking to make more time for your writing? (And by writing I mean anything, your blog posts, your poetry, a memoir, a sales page…)
If so, join me in this coworking event for writers (and those who are writing and don’t consider themselves writers…) Set aside time and create a shared commitment to work on your writing project.
Click here for more information on dates, times and to register if you wish.