The Communications Nuts & Bolts of Building A Successful Business: 5: The Blank Page And How To Deal With It.

Those who don’t get terrorized by the thought actually find themselves getting kind of excited.

These are the people who like a challenge. Who have never considered writing as having anything to do with work and everything to do with expression and passion and pure communication.

I can’t tell you the number of times a client or associates has confessed to me that the prospect of starting a piece of communication, no matter what it is, just scares the crap out of them.

This fear has as much to do with their mindset as is does with anything else. If a person has convinced themselves that they cannot write, it’s generally related to a fear of failure of some kind. Nobody wants to write something that the people who read it can easily find fault with.

And in today’s digital world the feedback you get on anything you write is fast and sometimes furious. So if you have any trepidation about it going in, all it would take, in many cases, is one supercritical comment to get that fear to bubble up into a phobia, from which only a few return.

If you have not been a writer all your life, and have only become one as a result of the demands of the digital marketplace, a certain amount of fear is a good thing to carry around. It keeps you honest.

But like all things in this life, the blank page can be conquered, and it’s probably not as tough a deal as you might think.

How To Conquer The Blank Page In 7 Easy Steps

1. Have An Idea: It takes a great deal of skill and experience to confront a blank page with no idea of what’s going to fill it. You need to have some idea of how it will be structured and what you want to communicate before you start writing.

2. Look Before You Leap: The key element in getting off to a good start is knowing a lot about what you are going to write about. Do your research. Figure out the points you want to make and what you are going to use to support those points to make your argument valid. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, you need to know your song well before you start singing.

3. Figure Out Who You Are Talking To And What They Are Looking For. A very effective way to get your communication to work hard for you is being able to talk to your prospects in a challenge/solution way. If you can identify a challenge they might be facing and be part of the solution to that challenge, that is going to get you noticed. But that only comes from a solid understanding of your target audience and what makes them tick or keeps them up at night.

4. Don’t Get All Hung Up With Style. If you’re not a professional writer, style is the last thing you should be worried about. Concentrate instead of creating a rational continuous narrative that tells a good story.

5. Check Your Facts. Facts are easy to verify these days. So if you are making an selling argument, no matter how circumspect it might be, its persuasiveness is directly related to the accuracy of the facts you have at your disposal. If your selling argument makes sense and is lucid, very few people will actually care that much about style. They will be too busy wondering if you are not really onto something.

6. Avoid Trying Too Hard. Most of the marketing stuff you write needs to have the objective of getting people interested enough to respond. But hitting people over the head with a call to action or challenging them to try your product or services can be a turnoff. Solid sales relationships are generally the result of a light bulb that goes in in the head of the buyer. You provide the bulb and the electricity, but they are the ones that need to flip the switch.

7. Be Yourself. People buy people not things or processes. If you make your communications honest, simple and likeable, and tell your story in a straightforward way, you stand a much better chance of appealing to your prospect than if you try too hard to impress or come across as less than humble.

Now these steps I have laid out here are not that difficult to achieve. For most professional writers this is all second nature. But I do understand that not everyone will have the requisite skills to pull this off.

If that’s the case with you, my advice is to go ahead and plow though this process anyway, then take your rough draft and hire a professional writer to fine tune it. This costs considerably less than hiring them to do the whole job. It also preserves the bulk of your ‘authenticity’, and, best of all, looking at what that writer has done will give you some valuable insights into how to get better as you move through the process.

I have done this with several clients over the years, especially with blogging, and was always amazed at how much better their drafts became the more their were able to see what I was doing to tighten them.

I sincerely hope you find this useful, and that it leads you to being able to write better communications and achieve better results with it.

There’s a lot of crap out there. And the only people who really get noticed are the one that are making sense and being themselves.

Other Posts In This Series Include:

The Communications Nuts & Bolts Of Building A Successful Business: 4: The Baseball Metaphor As It Applies To Sales

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/the-communications-nuts-bolts-of-building-a-successful-business-4-the-baseball-metaphor-as-it-applies-to-sales

The Communications Nuts & Bolts Of Building A Successful Business: 3: Marketing Tools

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/the-communications-nuts-bolts-of-building-a-successful-business-3-marketing-tools

The Communications Nuts & Bolts Of Building A Successful Business: 2. Consistent Voice

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/the-communications-nuts-bolts-of-building-a-successful-business-2-consistent-voice

The Communications Nuts & Bolts Of Building A Successful Business: 1: Branding

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/the-communications-nuts-bolts-of-building-a-successful-business-1-branding

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