It’s time to pick up the quill and write

Without question, the best way to market a professional creative service business is through content marketing. And if you’re going to implement a content strategy, you’re going to have to write.

Recovering From A Fear of Writing

But many creative professionals (besides writers) are more comfortable communicating through images than writing. But for a host of reasons your marketing demands writing.

The four most recent episodes of my podcast, 5 Minutes on Creative Entrepreneurship, deal with the topic of writing. Rather than restating everything I had to say in those episodes, I’d like to simply summarize them here, and commend them to your listening—because writing is a skill you’re going to need to prioritize and cultivate.

Episode 41: Facing Your Fear of Writing

In episode 41 I provide some extra motivation for the admittedly hard task of writing. Wrestling with words and corralling concepts will pay dividends beyond their basic function of providing content for marketing. Writing makes you a more competent professional. It makes you a clearer thinker. It cultivates insights and refines your influence. As difficult as writing may be, it will make you better at everything else you do— and it’s worth the discipline and pain involved in the process.

Episode 42: Confessions from a Terrible Writer

In episode 42 I acknowledge my own very humble beginnings as a writer. “Humble” is the most charitable description—more like modifying bad, or embarrassingly inept. Of course, I went to public school, followed by art school, which certainly didn’t do me any favors. And so I’ve had to learn by receiving LOTS of correction as I’ve found my way as a writer. In this episode, I provide a few pointers for the writing process to help speed you on your way to cultivating this important skill.

Episode 43: Don’t Just Show. Tell!

In episode 43 I provide some easy starter material for writing about your creative practice. Your portfolio can and should be much more than a series of rectangular jpegs of your finished product. There’s so much more to say about your work—you can talk about your process, your thinking, and your strategy. You can also talk about the stories behind those projects. Prospective clients want to learn what it’s like to work with you as a person in addition to evaluating your basic capabilities.

Episode 44: Is an “Empty Canvas” Content Strategy Defeating Your Marketing?

And in episode 44 we move past the low hanging fruit of writing about your work and consider your longer-term editorial calendar. Marketing is a marathon and your content needs to steadily drip as an ongoing heartbeat—not an occasional desperate dash when your work dries up. If the prospect of writing a thoughtful piece of content every single month (or more) is terrifying to you, it’s probably because you’ve tried to do it with a generalist positioning. That approach is as increasingly difficult as it is meager in results. But if you rethink this process, from the perspective of PinPoint positioning, content idea generation is far easier and its impact gets stronger and stronger each and every month.

I hope you get a chance to listen to these four episodes (and subscribe to the podcast). It takes a lot of discipline to commit to a regime of writing, and you can use all the encouragement and help that you can get.