Joe Taylor Jr.

Philadelphia Content Strategist, User Experience Consultant, and Author

writing

In praise of your office’s reluctant writer.

You’re not alone if you’re in a job that requires you to take on posting online content and writing a lot of copy—especially if you don’t consider yourself a writer. I’ve grown pretty fascinated with “reluctant writers” who perform extraordinary well in jobs that don’t require much more written communication than occasional e-mail. However, in our hyper-connected online world, where more of our jobs require

Writing doesn’t have to wreck your schedule. Many of the participants in my workshops express a frustration about having to wedge writing into a day that’s already over-full with meetings, reviews, and managing customer relationships. Instead of getting flustered about “one more task” in the pipeline, we focus on workflows and tools that help managers gather ideas throughout the week. A post you write with the help of a page of notes goes much more quickly than a column you’re trying to compose from a totally blank screen.

Writing for the web doesn’t mean you’re locked into an idea forever. Some of my favorite workshop participants have broken into smiles when we discussed the concept of editing and iteration. Even for someone who might not want anything more than “being done” with a blog post for their corporate intranet, it’s reassuring to know that every content management system I know of has either an “update” or a “delete” button. When you know you can start over or start fresh, writing becomes much less intimidating.

Writing doesn’t have to be something that only “authors” do. Culture’s caught up with my clients who never attended more than a basic high school writing course. You don’t need years of training, you don’t need to memorize quotes by Hemingway, and you don’t need a whole lot of fancy tools or software. If you can tell a story—and nearly all of us know how—you can write something that works to help move your business objectives forward.

All three of those concepts show up in the course I’m opening soon. It’s named “Writing WTF?” after the reaction that many of my corporate clients had when they found out that blogs, press releases, or marketing copy was suddenly part of their job description. I think it’s an irreverent look at the specific routines and tips I’ve shared with clients over the past ten years, and I’d love for you to join us. Visit our preview page for a video introduction from me, and for full details about the course.

Who cares about your stories when there’s already too much content?

If there’s already “too much content,” why even bother to write anything new?

It turns out, the average lifespan of a blog post or a news article is just about three days. Older than that, and your audience has already moved on to something that feels fresher. If you’re remarkable about getting traffic to your site from sources beyond social media, you could hope to stretch your content’s usefulness out to about two years.

In fact, American pop culture’s obsessed with reboots right now. If you count comic book movies alone, we’re on our second X-Men cast in the past two decades, and our third Spider-Man. Ben Affleck’s our ninth Batman.

That’s a phenomenon that’s tied to our very recent ability to record everything, forever.

Think about it this way: If we couldn’t revisit our same texts, thoughts, or ideas, we’d have stopped performing Hamlet shortly after it debuted on the stage in 1607.

But we didn’t.

If we had, Thomas Betteron wouldn’t have built a fifty-year career on the role. Sarah Siddons wouldn’t have pushed the envelope by playing both Hamlet and Ophelia.

For a long time, this was the problem I described when I first worked as a radio producer who didn’t quite understand his job. These artists would keep showing up at my station so I could record rough, acoustic versions of songs they had just spent months recording in studios under ideal conditions. During those first few years, I learned what I teach clients today: the work evolves and changes over time. We can love the “album version,” while still exploring the evolution of the same music and lyrics under a different arrangement. By the time we get to other artists’ cover versions of a song, we’re into transformative territory.

This brings me back to the concept I try to get across about “content” on business websites. It’s never really done, and it’s always evolving. And if you’re blocked for ideas about what to put into your blog or onto social media, don’t worry about reinventing the wheel. Start from a familiar idea that you want to explore with a fresh perspective. Share where you’re at right now.

You might not have the resource to update your site with fresh content every three days, but you can certainly get yourself on a cycle where you revisit your strongest posts and articles every two years. Extend them, expand them, or even argue with them based on what’s chage. What’s important is that you keep yourself in the conversation.

Do you need help auditing your existing site, or coming up with new ideas for content? We’ve got you covered. Join my latest content discovery course or sign up for a discovery session with me and my team.