How to Write Content (When You Hate Writing)

I’ll let you in on a little industry secret: even writers don’t like writing. Writing can be invigorating, watching the pieces fall into place…but more often than not, it’s a deadline breathing down your neck and a creative well run dry.

Like many things in life, you have to fake it till you make it. If you’re not a writer by nature, that’s ok. You can still produce great blogs, social media posts and emails for your company. You just have to know how to fake it.

Use Your Customers for Topics

One of the biggest challenges non-writers face (and even writers) is coming up with topics. We happen to have a handy-dandy list of 20 questions you can ask to brainstorm topics, but even beyond that there’s a huge untapped resource right at your fingertips: your customers. What questions do you hear all the time from your customers? What are the most common troubleshooting problems your customer service team deals with? What services do your customers ask the most about? Listen to these daily conversations and jot questions down when you hear them. These should be the topics you address in all your content. 

Use a Template

An easy way to build content is to start with a foundation and make it your own. You can find many sample content templates online you can tweak to suit your needs. We also have guidelines for blogs, emails and social media posts that you can use to create your own content.

Hack It

No, you can’t hack into your blog Matrix-style, but you can use content writing hacks to get you ahead. We have a full blog post rounding up some easy writing hacks that will save you time. One hack we love is leveraging curated content – taking existing content and remixing it to make it your own. The easiest way to curate content is in a roundup-style post, where you create a list and share content pieces (e.g., “Top 10 Indie Bands in Minneapolis” or “5 Examples of High-Performing Sales Scripts”). The key to curating and what sets it apart from a no-no like plagiarism is that you clearly state where you got content pieces and link back to the original source. Check out our 20 Writing Prompts for Quick and Creative Emails for an example of a curated blog post.

Leverage GDD

The simplest way to create compelling content is to break it down into manageable chunks. That’s where Growth-Driven Web Design (GDD) comes in. This is a new process for developing websites that’s built on continuously improving your website instead of using a static design. In GDD, we actively monitor how your visitors engage with your website and react in real-time. When you know exactly how your visitors react to a page, you can build content to suit that need. 

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Need a new digital marketing or web design plan? We are a Minneapolis SEO, digital marketing, social media marketing, web design and inbound marketing agency. We’re located just outside of Minneapolis. Stop on by and get started – and while you’re here, pick up a free honey stick (yes, we love our bee-related theme).