… my website is officially live.
I’ve chosen a URL that reflects both my ambition to become my own personal brand, and that is memorable enough to be shared without business cards. It is:
www.jonjo.london
I was having a chat with a friend the other day. He warned me to keep the blog content coming, lest I would wind up with a blog that made my website appear ‘dead’.
As we all know, coming up with blog ideas is hard. I write blogs for a living, and yet I find half the work is in the planning, concepting and strategy side. Writing the actual copy is the easy part.
Some of my clients think I’m mad when I tell them to just get stuck in and write whatever comes to mind. I have been known to give advice such as “treat your blog like your personal diary” and “even if you’re only writing 50 words about the news of the day, just get something out there.”
Many businesses, especially big corporations, ignore this advice. They think it will:
Damage their brand value
Make their experts appear unprofessional
Compete for attention with higher-quality content
I often don’t have the guts to tell them they’re wrong.
You can’t be a thought leader if you don’t have thoughts
This is a line I once delivered to a potential client in a pitch. Their C-suite team nodded their heads and took turns telling me the ideas they’d had bottled away for far too long.
Many of the thoughts they shared with me went beyond the routine-driven content they had been putting on their blog up to that point. Their thoughts were unique, abstract, intriguing, conceptual, even philosophical.
They were the kind of thoughts I would have wanted to read. They were the kind of thoughts you would have wanted to read. They were the kind of thoughts their competitors would have wanted to read.
I offered to turn each of their incredible thoughts into a blog post. “By the end of next week, we could have your blog full of these incredible ideas!” I said.
They grinned, told me how excited they were, then shook our hands as we walked out the door.
We got a call the next day to tell us they’d chosen the other agency.
Three years on their blog is full of the same SEO-bait rubbish they were putting up before. And I still don’t think anyone in their industry are calling them ‘thought leaders’.
C’est la vie.
Practice what you preach
With this blog, I want to demonstrate my personal philosophy when it comes to writing.
It’s something I call Just Write, Just Wrong.
When I was starting out as a writer, I asked my first mentor what was the best way to learn how to become an excellent writer. Which books should I read? Which courses should I take? Which editors should I work with?
He told me to forget all that, and instead focus on doing one thing: “Just write.”
When a thought comes to mind, just write. When you develop writer’s block, just write. When you make a career-ending mistake, when you receive criticism that shreds your heart to pieces, and when you start to think no one is reading what you’re writing: just write.
You don’t have to publish everything, he said – especially if it’s just wrong. But you still have to write.
I can’t tell you the number of opening paragraphs, first drafts and files marked “PERSONAL” I have saved on my hard drive.
It’s all practice. It’s all there to keep my writing muscles limber.
Great writing is a form of athletics
This leads me on to another excellent piece of advice I once received. As a writer, try to treat yourself like an athlete.
In other words, make sure you are getting regular, intense training. That means not only reading, studying and practicing, but living your life in a way that facilitates your ability to write.
This is what I try to do. Wherever I go, I carry a journal. I make studies of people, buildings, objects or even concepts. I try to utilise new words in order to grow my vocabulary.
I also study foreign languages. At the moment, I’m learning Spanish. Learning about the development of languages from a foreign perspective helps me to understand not only how language has evolved, but how the brain processes it.
And most importantly of all, I talk to people. I love talking. Someone recently said I have the “gift of the gab”. I’ve never felt so flattered. Talking is so important as a writer. When you talk to people, you open up neural pathways that would have previously been beyond your imagination. The best ideas, the greatest stories, the funniest humour, the most exciting revelations are all borne out of conversation.
If you are a part-time writer – for instance, a businessperson with a blog – you probably won’t have the time to sit and pontificate about the nature of language as often or for as long as I do. But if you are interested in developing your own writing skills, try taking inspiration from the athletes:
Use your spare time to “Just Write”. Even if it’s not your best work, even if it’ll never get published, it’s still practice
Read a variety of works – don’t just stick to one genre or your favourite author – and especially make sure to read the classics
Understand that our world is built on language and storytelling, and try to look at everything in your life from this perspective
And if you’re having trouble writing a good blog…
… bear in mind that I wrote this blog post in 40 minutes just using some of the thoughts I’d had stored away in my head for a while.
Don’t pressure yourself into writing the next Shakespeare every time you sit down to write for your blog or website. Instead, let the words come naturally. You don’t need to strive to be a thought leader, if you believe you already are one – instead, you just need to get those thoughts out there.
Alternatively, you can always hire a writing athlete like me.
Thanks for reading. And tell your friends about jonjo.london!