How to Create Engaging and Authoritative Content – Part 5

In our final essay on how to produce profitable and engaging content, we will address the great “boogey man” that inevitably comes to plague all career content creators writers – writer’s block.

We go back to one of the primary reasons why is so important to be a niche that you’re genuinely interested, that you enjoy researching, and that you might have some work experience you can monetize as a case study.  Even content writers that have all three of these traits can nonetheless be afflicted by writer’s block, and if your goal is to become a long-term content creator, finding ways to cope with it should be perceived as simply another tool in the comprehensive and multi-faceted tool kit that this five part series has tried to give you.

Here are seven strategies to help keep writer’s block at bay.

I) If you’re going to become a full-time writer, then you should adopt the tools of the trade.  You should note that when going about their daily business, a lot of writers will keep audio recorders with them, or apps on their phones where they can store notes and brain doodles. 

Great topics and ideas can often be like fire flies; you’ll have a bright flash of genius that quickly fades and is forgotten if you don’t write it down and record it.  A great strategy that can be used to supplement these new professional tools is to…

II) Train and discipline your brainstorming sessions, and when you’re in the zone as a writer, strike while the iron is hot.  If you decide to embrace being a professional content writer as a full-time job, then you have a very simple choice.  When it comes to your niche, you can live a day-by-day existence, which can be a highly stressful existence when having to meet deadlines, or, you can build-up a reservoir of articles that you can fall back on as a safety net.. 

If after completing an article you still feel like you’re in “the zone,” keep writing.  Try to write as many articles you possibily can while the juices are still flowing.  Additionally, pick a day in the week in the week and commit yourself to nothing but brainstorming topics and articles. 

Here is where “knowing yourself” as a writer also helps to amplify the quality of writing that these brainstorming sessions produce.  Are you a morning person or a night owl?  What types of activities really get the juices flowing – drinking a gourment cup of coffee, exercising, taking a walk in the park, etc. 

Despite what you might have been told, content writer can be an incredibly stressful and time-consuming job, so adopting strategies that help you stay ahead of the curve can help reduce a lot of stress and anxiety in you life.

III) Change up you the mediums that you’re using.  As we discussed in the second article of this series, at some point you have to make the leap from simly being a content writer to a content creator.  If you’re having writer’s block, then try creating content through podcasts, YouTube clips, as well as developing your skills as an interviewer and then seeking out authority figures in your industry.   

There are several benefits to this strategy; the first being that approaching a topic through a different medium could be the cure.  Second, the more mediums you can utilize, the more engaging your website will be, as well as being able to utilize platforms such as YouTube to funnel more traffic to your website.  Finally, developing good interview skills open up an entire field of fresh content that also helps to build your reputation as an authority within the field. 

It also teaches you a valuable lesson about content creations – you don’t always have to be the center of attention.  This common sense observation brings us to our next strategy.

IV) Establish a long-term goal to write, publish, and sell an eBook on your website.  One of the best ways to cure writer’s block is to monetize your motivation for researching and writing, and you can kill two birds with one stone using this strategy.

Pick a monthly traffic number for your website, and regardless of how you’ve decided to montetize your site (advertising, affiliate marketing, making handcrafted products, etc.), once you hit that target, enhance your authority within your niche even further by publishing an eBook.  Looking at a financial windfall of thousands if not tens of thousands dollars can be just the right motivation you need to hunker down and produce content. 

V) Buy a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations for both article topics and personal inspiration.  An easy way to produce great articles would be to harvest a great list of quotes from famous people and post them as motivation to your readership.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Teddy Roosevelt.  Do you find it inspirational?  Could you build an article around it?

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

VI) Mind sites like Reddit, Facebook, as well as niche-oriented websites for topic ideas.  You could come at this strategy from two different angles.  The first is to approach these websites purely from the perspective of poaching great topic ideas and then reworking and rewriting them as your own.  People do it all the time, and as long as you could look at the topic and say, “I took that topic and made it my own through my own research, insights, and ideas,” then you needn’t apologize.   

Or, you could come at this strategy through a much more long-term strategay grounded upon three simple words – network, network, network.  Great topic ideas are just the icing on the cake.  The real advantages to this strategy are building up relationships with fellow bloggers and content producers in your niche, funneling traffic to your own site through the quality of your posts and participations, getting interviews with leaders within your industry, as well as getting guest bloggers to post on your site.

Speaking of guest bloggers…

VII) Bring in guest bloggers, and if you get big enough, launch a Kickstarter campaign in order to elevate your website to a whole new level by creating a writing staff.  Call in reinforcements on your blog by asking guest bloggers to write an article for your website.  Even better, monetize your guest blogging spots by creating a public profile on platform like Fivver that allows young, hungry content creators to gain access to your web traffic and audience…for a price.

If you ever reach the point where the demand for content becomes so great that you need to hire a writing staff, kill two birds with one stone by launching a Kickstarter campaign.  Not only stressing over content as well as writer’s block be a thing of the past, but you could also raise thousands if not tens of thousands in capital that could take your website to a whole new level of profitability.

Conclusion –  This is our final essay in our series on creation content, and we hope that you’ve learned some useful tricks, tactics, and strategies that can help keep the juices flowing.  If you get into this industry and commit yourself to making a living from it over the long haul, then by itself, raw talent is often not enough (nor for that matter will raw talent equate to profitability and your ability to earn a livelihood).  To succeed, you need to build a multifaceted toolkit that you can utilize to create a constant and reliable stream of profitable, authoratitative, and engaging content.