Create Compelling Content the Easy Way

Over the past few days, we have discussed the importance of consistently creating high quality content for your web site or blog.

How it will help your site grow in the search engine rankings.

How more people will link to you because of your great content.

How you will get a steadier, ever increasing number of readers.

But many of you, in the back of your minds, are saying, “that’s easy for HIM to say, but I can’t write!”.

That’s what you think.

You write emails, don’t you?

What if I wrote you an email asking you a specific question about something you happen to know a lot about? Do you suppose you could give me some sort of coherent, articulate response in return?

I take that answer as a “yes”.

So I’ll give you a little exercise that can help you create a good number of simple, straightforward, high quality articles for your web site or blog if you follow through with it.

Hopefully, your site deals with a subject matter with which you are intimately familiar and feel quite passionate about. It also deals with what some others might perceive as a problem or area of confusion.

In short, your audience has a lot of questions about that particular area (whether it be weight loss, digital photography, dog training or whatever else it is you specialize in).

So you know that people have questions, right? You know that you have the answers, right? Let’s put them together.

Sit down and write out the most commonly asked questions people have about your particular expertise. Write these questions in the same way a friend of yours might ask them. Keep on writing those questions until you get to 25. If you are on a tear and get up to 50 or more — awesome! Keep it going until you run out of steam.

OK, now is the fun part.

Take each one of those questions and email them to you at your email address. Yes, send yourself anywhere from 25-50 individual emails.

Then I want you to open them up, one by one, and reply with an answer and explanation exactly as you would if one of your readers wrote in.

No need to get elaborate. No need to pontificate. Write in the same voice and personal style you would write to me if I wrote and asked you a question.

Limit your responses to no more than 300-500 words, which is about the max of people’s attention span online anyway.

When you’ve got one question answered to your satisfaction, hit the reply button and send it on its way. When it arrives back in a matter of seconds, file it away in a special folder you’ve created just for these Q&A’s.

Keep working on answers to these questions until you have all 25 (or 50) done.

Voila! You have 25-50 articles for your site. You can publish them as the Q&As that they are, or just publish the answers. Tweak and edit them a bit for your audience and you are all set. You have a month or two worth of editorial ready to run…

Any time you think up a few other questions, write yourself an email, and answer them. File them away for another day.

It’s a relaxed and easy way to create content that is a whole lot less stressful than sitting down to WRITE AN ARTICLE. That’s why you develop writer’s block.

I speak from experience.

The fundamental idea here is that every piece you write for your web site or blog should be an answer to a question or problem that your readers have about your area of expertise. If you aren’t helping them in some way, you probably aren’t writing anything that is terribly interesting.

So what question am I answering here?

The question would be something like this:

Dear Andy,

Every time I try to create an article for my blog, I freeze up and can’t write a word. I just sit there and stare at the screen. Do you have any suggestions for how I might overcome that and thus create more content for my web site?

Frozen in Fargo

Try it. I hope it helps you. Drop me a note if I can ever be of assistance at Andrew AT Bourland DOT com.

Stay tuned…