What do you write when you have “nothing to write”.

I speed blog* regularly with a local client – and when we got together last week she was having one of those days when she felt  “I got nothing”.

So I turned it around – to find out what SHE was currently interested in   We started talking about a fairly technical article in a professional journal that was validating one of her approaches.

Then we explored how to take what she was interested in and turn it into blog post:

• What was relevant and helpful about the article for her clients and potential clients?
• What “complicated” facts would be useful for them to know and understand – and how would she “translate” them for busy, tired clients?
• How could she turn the facts she was explaining into specific useful actions that would be easy for her clients to take?

So we went through that article together to identify:

• What in the article would be confusing to her client base?
• How could she use humour and straight forward, conversational language to deal with those confusions?
• How we could sequence what we’d distilled, using the “why/what/how/what else” formula?

And there we were – within an hour, we had a blog post that just needed a photo (one she could easily take) in order to be published.

So when you’re staring down that blank screen, step back and share a bit of you – what interests you, right now?

Turn to something you’ve read or something you’ve seen and share it.

The added benefit is that when you share what you like then YOU show up as a real person – someone worth connecting with.  Someone to be known, liked and trusted.

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* Speed blogging is a bit like speed dating.   It’s a short F2F meeting where I write a blog post as my client talks, actually creating a draft blog post as we talk.  Sometimes I work in WordPress, other times in a shared Google doc if our “F2F” meeting is courtesy of an Internet connection.