Can You Write a Year Ahead?

We make marketing plans in advance; we plan what products we will produce and what webinars we will teach, but what if we sat down and not only planned but wrote our blog posts a year in advance?  It would produce a cohesive series of valuable information that will definitely please our target community.

 

There are always slow months in your business.  Sometimes it’s around the winter holidays; sometimes it’s during the summer.  Choose 30 days to focus on your writing and immerse yourself in not only the topics but improving your writing skills.

 

Your first ten articles can be focused on answering the questions that the people that need and want your particular service ask the most.  My list might include "Why do I need information products?" and “\"What should my opt offer be?"

 

In the next ten articles answer the questions they should ask. "Can I write an ebook even if I’m not a very good writer?"  Or "I have so many ideas, how do I choose the best one?"

 

This is such an easy first 20 articles you can get those done nearly as fast as you can write.

 

Write a series that teaches a part of what you help people do.  I broke my original teleclass on my Magnetic Content Development System into a series of 9 ebooks.  Each of those ebooks is overflowing with ideas that can be turned into a series of articles. I can do a series on "Five Easy Ways to Improve Your Writing" or"“How to Develop a Compelling Table of Contents."  Once you start thinking about what you can teach you will be inundated with ideas.

 

Exploring an idea through writing is an organic process.  This article is an example.  I read about the idea of writing a year’s worth of blog posts in a year in a post by Kelly Kingman of eBook Evolution. On ProBlogger and wondered how I would do that.  The idea for the 10-10 series came from a video interview with video expert Sherman Hu I watched recently. Exploring and understanding an interesting concept by writing about it has been something I’ve always done.  Now I’m writing this article to see how you and I might increase the number of articles we produce in a timely manner and have a great time doing it. Keep a list of ideas that interest you that would make a good article when you explore your version of a particular concept more deeply.

 

There is so much information available today that having someone in my field recommend a book to me and tell me why it would be helpful saves me time.  I appreciated Chris Brogan’s www.chrisborgan.com articles on Google + when they first appeared.  And I’m always open to reading about new plug-ins and software.  Add ten reviews of products or books to your list of topics.

This may be as simple as interviewing someone by phone, recording it and making a transcript.  Start with people you know until you are comfortable with the interview process and learn how to ask strong open ended questions.  Build a library of interviews that are relevant to your target community. An added bonus is that when you post the interview on your site, the person you interviewed will post it on theirs. 

 

Look at what you know that you want to share with other people.  Plan a series of articles on each topic.  Ten topics times 10 articles each equals 100 articles.   If you post two a week you’ve got a year’s worth of articles ready to go. 

 

I have a very long folder of written articles that need another draft.  I never post the same day I write and when I return I read them with a fresh mind and invariably make some changes.  Don’t post an article unless it is good.  Does it make your point?  Are the action steps clear?  Read it out loud to hear its rhythm. Go ahead and write a year’s worth of posts and at the same time be prepared to rewrite and edit some of them more than once.  Don’t let a perceived deadline that you made up for yourself force you to put up articles that need more work.  At the same time, don’t be a perfectionist.  You can always make something better.  Do the best you can in this moment of time and post it.

 

Take a moment now to start your idea list and see how close to 50 topics you can come using these ideas.  Whether you set aside 30 days to write them all or are satisfied with a strong editorial calendar for the coming year you will be one step closer to building your own library of relevant articles.

 

© 2011 Cara Lumen