If content is king, what happens when you get writers’ block?
You are staring at a blank white screen on your computer, your hands poised nervously over the computer keyboard (or if you are old school, the 8”x14” yellow legal pad with a pen in your hands) waiting for some inspiration to hit you.
I have been plagued with writer’s block for a few days and have been wracking my brain for ideas; I have been scouring the internet for some revelation of what I could write about for this issue of Rainmaking Recommendations, and……..
NOTHING!
Until I realized that this is a perfect topic for the Rainmaking Recommendations.
I know I am not the only one who gets writer’s block. In fact, when you Google “How to get rid of writer’s block,” more than a million websites pop up.
One of the pieces of advice is to just start writing. Well, if it was that easy, I wouldn’t have been sitting in front of my (expletive) computer for the past 3 days trying to figure out what I want to write about.
As lawyers, we tend to be perfectionists, and this is one of the traits that almost every article and post I read said could contribute to writer’s block. Okay, but I’m not willing to put out subpar material by just writing, so now what?
And then I remembered something that my good friend and esteemed colleague, Lindsay Griffiths , the Director of Global Relationship Management at the International Lawyers Network, suggested I do about 4 years ago – create a “content calendar” – which I did (4 years ago) and proceeded to file away in a Redwell on the shelf – which, by the way, doesn’t do me any good sitting on the shelf. I just found the calendar and it provided some ideas for some future blogs and Rainmaking Recommendations. However, because of this experience I decided to write about writer’s block today.
While some of the topics on my content list have already been written about on my blog site, there are still many that I can explore. In fact, I plan, after I post this, to update that “calendar” with more ideas II have thought of from just revisiting it.
A content calendar details what you are going to post and when. It is simply a guide to help you market your authority to your ideal clients, prospective clients and referral sources. You can actually use a calendar, or task list, or in my case just a list.
What I do is create an overarching topic and then subtopics around it. For example, if you are a matrimonial attorney, you can create the overarching topic: Divorce. And then under than create subtopics like:
- How to hire a divorce lawyer
- The things your divorce lawyer needs to know
- What is alimony and how is it calculated
- Why you shouldn’t bad mouth your spouse on social media
- How to save money on your divorce
(if there are any matrimonial attorneys reading this, I give you permission to steal some of those ideas)
And so on. Then you can use the overarching topic of Child Custody and come up with subtopics for that.
Many times I write spontaneously about things upon which I am coaching my clients. Or about something I read online in a law journal or even a marketing blog. However, this list will come in very handy in the near future if and when I experience a block again. .
Whether you use a calendar or a list, having ideas available in just such instances will help you overcome writer’s block just as it did for me this time.
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