Creating Contnt as Far as Your Headlights

Content writers can take comfort in a quote by the editor of the Writer magazine of advice offered to novelists by E.L. Doctorow:

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. You don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.”

At some point, the process of writing a single novel is “completed”. In contrast, the process of creating content for a blog is never done. As with planning a novel, at the outset of planning a business blog, the content writer defines the basic story lines and themes. With the power of content marketing itself well-proven and documented, many business owners and professional practitioners embark on the strategy in recognition of its power to generate interest in their products and services. It’s the week-after-week work of creating new, relevant, interesting, and results-producing blog posts that has many sitting in the driver’s seat while the car stalls, feeling unable to muster strength for the long journey ahead. The resulting sad statistic – 90% of all bloggers for business neglect or abandon their efforts.

The Writer contributor Emma Sloan describes procrastination as “a blank mind and an even blanker Word document, the inability to just start gnawing at the back of your brain even as you open yet another unrelated tab online.” The most useful advice Sloan offers: Just start. Set a timer for just five minutes to see what you can get done today.”

In practical terms, blog content writers need to keep on telling the business’ or the practice’s story in its infinite variations over long periods of time, knowing that, to a certain extent, the blog content readers who end up as clients and customers will have self-selected rather than having been persuaded, “recruited”, or sold. Capturing and focusing readers’ attention is the whole point of blog content writing. Still, it’s often the content creators who seem to lose their focus and their ‘drive”.

For the “right now”, when those ‘long periods of time” seem far too overwhelming, it’s good advice for blog writers need to focus on relaying to their readers a single concept – one “how-to”, one explanation, one benefit to web visitors – overcoming their own “stall” by driving only “as far as their headlights”.