Articles and blog posts are incredibly valuable in raising your brand and furthering your profile as an expert in your field. But often people find them hard to write, especially when they face writing their first piece.
There’s a reason that you – and many other people – might be struggling to write regular blog posts.
It’s because a typical blog post is what we and journalist’s call an opinion piece, and opinion is the hardest kind of writing to pull off successfully.
Journalists are graded, and paid, according to the difficulty of the writing tasks they do. It takes a year as a cadet before you make Grade 1! It’s only the higher grades – nine or 10 – that are asked to write opinion pieces (or op-eds, as they’re known in the business…because they traditionally were published opposite the editorial of the day).
So, if you are struggling, it’s because you are a cadet trying to write grade 10 stories.
Of course, we all have one or two passionate opinions in us, but once we have vented these, we find our blog can run out of puff. And opinion pieces can be a tough place to start for women in particular. I don’t think it is right, but women’s opinions are often judged as aggressive. We need to start by building support and a strong profile before we stick our necks out.
Two great options for starting your blog
Here are two types of stories that will get you started. Focus on one, or alternate these approaches to keep your interest up.
Reporting
Most cadets start by reporting – which means they are given a topic (we call it a “round”) and asked to find news on it. The court round, for example, involves sorting out which of the many court cases held on any one day might be on interest to the newspapers readers.
On my blog, I report on the content marketing sector because my readers are content marketers at various stages of that journey or those interested in commissioning content marketing. I write about data, research and trends; visiting luminaries and upcoming events. I write about issues and debates in the content marketing sector, and common questions that I hear from those people that I train and mentor.
Suppose you are in the financial planning sector, start writing about what is going on in your sector. For example, what are the new ideas and approaches to financial planning internationally; who are the new entrants into the local market; debates about commissions and whether they serve customers; academic research about investment and financial planning and financial literacy; changes to government regulation; how customers makes choices about their planners, and what they do if they have complaints?
Your readers — others in the financial planning sector, and those who want to find a financial planner – will understand how the sector works and how to make informed choices, and will come to your website to do that.
Case studies
I wrote one or more case studies every week for my first three years as a journalist. They are a terrific training ground. Potential subjects for case studies include your customers and target customers, international experts and visitors, researchers, innovators, authors, and other financial planning companies (yes, I recommend writing about your rivals).
Case studies are great, but they can be boring if they are too gushing. We need to find some drama, a little blood and guts. No one becomes successful without making mistakes. In fact, the most successful people typically make the biggest mistakes.
Your mission? Find out what problem the company or person overcame to become successful, and write about it dramatically. Don’t skip over it – it was a long hard road for Josephine Blogs, but today she is a millionaire. Get lots of detail: what was hard, why was it hard, did she want to give up, did she cry and wish she had never started, why didn’t she give up, how did she scramble out of this hole and rise to triumph.
Finish with your subject’s view on the future of her own company or the future of her industry.
Now… get writing! The world wants to read what you have to say.
