Once you’ve committed to using content marketing to grow your business, you discover that there’s a whole ton of writing that suddenly needs to get done.

As a service professional, that writing has to have the flavor of the uniqueness that you bring to the services that you deliver, so outsourcing the writing is difficult.

What that means is that you – or at least someone intimately familiar with your business – now has to write a whole ton of content for your blog, your newsletter, and your articles.

With deadlines looming, you might find that the writing isn’t happening.

As adults, we don’t have occasion to write that often.  Sure, you might send an email or two every day, but that isn’t the same as writing a 500 word blog post or article for your newsletter.  This type of writing takes a bit more thought and intention.

This is one of the biggest challenges to creating content to use for content marketing: we aren’t used to writing.

If you are faced with a new writing assignment and are struggling with getting it done, here’s a trick that I use myself, and I recommend it to my clients:

Start a habit of writing every day.

What you write isn’t as important as the fact that you sit down and write every day.  This gets your brain in shape and trains it to write during your “writing time”.  Once you’ve got your routine down, writing anything becomes easier when you use your “writing time.”  You can use it to write your web copy, create your newsletter articles, or even write that difficult email to a client.  Whatever you need to write will flow more easily when you have consistent practice in the art of writing.

You are going to want to create a safe place to write.  I don’t mean a physical location, but some place to put your writing so that it is just for you to see.  This type of writing isn’t for sharing (unless you decide to do so after the fact), so you’ll want somewhere to write that others can’t easily find.

You can create a document in your word possessing program, or use old fashioned pen and paper, put I highly recommend 750words.com:

• Sign up is free.
• You can keep what you write totally private or publish it to the 750words community.
• Daily emails remind you to write 750 words daily.
• You get rewards for completing each day (and partial rewards for partial days).
• Your spelling and grammar mistakes are not highlighted.
• 750 words can be written in about 15 minutes and is enough to finish a thought or not.

To start a writing habit:

1. Pick a time of day when you are your most creative.
2. Sit down at your computer and log into 750words.com
3. Type whatever comes into your head without censoring or editing it in anyway.  Leave the spelling and typos.  Just type.
4. The system will let you know when you’ve reached 750 words by giving you a congratulations message.  If you want to see how you are doing, your word count is also listed at the bottom of the screen.
5. See how many days you can write in a row.  When you’ve reached a certain number of days in a row, you’ll earn a bird badge for your page.   For truly dedicated writers, you can earn a Pegasus for writing 365 days in a row (but there are rewards for as few as 3 days in a row).

Writing in this way gets your brain in shape to do the more professional writing that you need to do.  But as you get into the habit of writing this way on a daily basis, you may discover another benefit: often what is in the way of our creative writing is the “stuff” in our lives that needs to get said first.  For instance, if you honey said something that bothered you or the traffic was particularly bad or the room is hot/cold. Once we get these more mundane life things out of your head, you may find that it is much easier to write what you need to write.

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