Part 4 (of 6) Busting Through Writer's Block
HERE’S WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT GOOD COPYWRITING:
Part 3 (of 6) Redefining Good Copywriting
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Connection is more important than creativity or cleverness.
There’s no magic formula, course, guru, or game-changing book that will give you what you need.
We’re consuming too much, and taking action is the only way to get out of drinking from the firehose.
You’re committed and you’re going to do it. You’re going to write your website copy. You have the whole day ahead of you with no meetings, a notebook of ideas, and a fresh Google Doc.
And there it is.
The blinking cursor.
Your heart races faster.
I don’t know what to write about.
Starting is too hard.
I don’t have anything interesting to say.
It’s going to take too long.
I have writer’s block. I’m going to go watch Netflix instead.
You think you have writer’s block, but really...
Writer’s block is bullshit.
The single best way to bust through it is just to write. Write something. Write anything.
There’s no 7-step process, no rules, no secret, no magic pill.
If it’s time to write a blog post and the blog just isn’t coming out. Just start. Write anything. Get it out no matter how messy it is.
There’s a difference between being blocked and being empty.
When you sit down to the page, clear your mind, and the words seem to fall out – that means you were full, and you come to the page to empty out.
To start the emptying out process, you need to be at the page and writing — one word at a time, one sentence at a time. It might start as a trickle before it begins to rain. Your only job is to give yourself the time and space to empty out.
Once you find yourself in that flow, let as much out as time and energy allows. You’ll go back and edit later.
To start emptying out you sit down and write something — write anything. Write an email, a letter, a grocery list. When you come back to that thing that you were trying to write, it will come easier.
The only way to get better at writing is by ...
WRITING!
Boring I know. It’s so much easier to blame the elusive “writer’s block,” when really, it doesn’t exist.
Business owners I’ve worked with often attend a community writing session and say,
“I have no idea what to write today, but I’m just going to start and see what comes up.”
“I was going to work on my opt-in sequence today, but now that I’m here I don’t feel like it. So I’m going to write something else.”
This right here is how you write. You come with an intention, and trust what happens next. Even if it looks different than you planned.
I love it when this happens. These business owners blocked the time on their calendar, made a plan, threw out the plan, or screwed the plan to begin with, showed up, and started writing anyway.
Even if it feels slow, clunky, awkward, and not quite right. Even though it feels awkward, tedious, and uncomfortable.
That is the only way to bust through writer's block.
Through.
Writing is going to be work.
What the gurus also don’t tell you is how many hours go into writing compelling copy. Let’s use some round numbers and some estimation.
Consider a signature online program that launches once a year to an audience of tens of thousands. In this example, this program has been running for 5 years.
For this example, we’re only going to look at the sales page.
Year 1 sales page writing and editing - 1 person - 5 hours
Year 2 sales page writing and editing - 2 people - 12 hours
Year 3 sales page writing and editing - 3 people - 20 hours
Year 4 sales page writing and editing - 4 people - 25 hours
Year 5 sales page writing and editing - 4 people - 35 hours
This is just a high-level example with some estimates based on my experience as a copywriter. By the time you land on their sales page — a team of experts has spent almost 40 hours tweaking, shining, and refining just one sales page. Not to mention the emails, social media copy, ad copy, and affiliate copy.
These business owners also:
Had several strategy meetings around positioning, language, tone, and word choice
Had 5 years of serving the exact clients this is for giving them ideal client language gold
Have at least 5 years of online business experience
With all this time and effort. It’s no wonder that...
If you’re not even thinking about buying what they had to offer, then someday you see a compelling ad, you click and sign up almost without even thinking.
When you compare your best effort of a sales page to this one, you fall down the comparison trap and wonder if you should just close the doors to your business and live on rice and beans.
And this is just the sales page I”m talking about! This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to sales copy.
All the other copy that goes into a launch:
Content planned, written, or recorded months in advance
Warm-up emails for the pre-sales period
Webinar emails
Webinar scripts
Webinar follow up emails
Webinar ad copy
PR strategy and pitches around podcast interviews, live video, and workshops
Sales emails
Onboarding messages
Course ad copy
This is just one launch. This all adds up to 50,000 words.
Do you know how much 50,000 words is? The average length of a manuscript.
You’re not going to write all the words for your next launch in an afternoon or even a week.
It’s a massive amount of copy to chew on and even if you did write it all in a week, my guess is you didn’t shower, leave your house, or eat anything other than takeout.
I tell you this not to scare you away from writing your own copy but to remind you to stay focused on your business goals and pay little attention to the shiny, long-form works of word and design art and keep your eyes on your own paper.
Think you can skip the essential step of writing for yourself and hire a team to do it all for you? Sure, you can do this, but without getting clear on who you are, how you want to show up in the world, and how your people behave, you might get pretty good results — it will be expensive, and you may have trouble repeating the process.
Most of my clients though are not looking for quick fixes or to grow multi-million dollar empires. They lead small group programs or work one-on-one with people and know they only need to reach a small pocket of people to build a profitable business that does good things for them, their clients, and their greater community.
Here’s the better way to write that lets you enjoy life and get better results…
Put a chunk of time on the calendar every day, even as little as 15 minutes to start, tuning out the distractions, and writing. And then the next day, writing some more.
By the time you revisit your writing, you’ll have new insights and will have planted the seeds in your mind. You’ll have later insights in the shower, while driving, and while stirring the almond milk into your coffee.
By putting the time on the calendar to write, and then showing up and you know, actually doing it, your writing will get done.
And imagine how much faster you could put your work out there if you had someone to give your copy, blog post, or an important email a once-over, to offer up a few pointers to make it better, to share some expert copywriting advice, all right there, right then, exactly at the time you need it. Not like inside an online course where you might devour all 12 weeks of videos over a few months and then forget which lessons applied to the thing you’re writing now.
This is another problem with courses that don’t have you implementing right then right when you’ll use the information. You forget what you already think you should know, but I digress.
I’m a writer and there were several months when I stopped writing. I felt like I was forcing it. I had so many starts and stops on creative projects of my own that I got tired of thinking about them at 2 am.
There were stretches of months when I was thinking about writing way more than I was actually writing.
And it sucked. As a done-for-you copywriter, I was dedicating all my time to writing for others. I keep all my deadlines and put my client work first. It’s what paid the bills after all.
Which is great for them and great as a conscious business owner, but my work wasn’t happening.
For months, getting any words out for my own writing felt painful, slow, and tedious. I used up all my energy focusing on others
So I stopped trying.
The only reason I can talk about it now is that I’ve gotten to the other side and know what worked for me. I tested it out with other business owners and it worked for them too. And yes, I still believe that writer's block is BS and that the only way out is through.
I decided to press pause on blogging until I could figure it out. I didn’t want to put content out there for content’s sake.
Even though there was a “block” — as in, it felt hard for me, I realized I was empty. Instead, I focused on maintaining the weekly newsletter I’d been sending to email subscribers since 2012. Writing an email to the people who let me into their inboxes each week felt light and easy.
By taking the pressure off, I was able to find flow. This was just blogging though. I had a big list of half-finished writing projects that I wanted to finish but wasn’t making the time to do it.
Instead of continuing to feel shitty about it, in the work I did with my coach, (yes, coaches have coaches too), I got really clear on my personal and business values.
To align with those values, my writing had to go back to the top of the list. We agreed to commit just three hours a week to my book project.
By putting my writing first, I was telling my brain:
I’m important.
It’s safe to be seen and put my words out there.
My stories matter.
I show up and serve my clients better when I put myself and my values first.
The work I do is valuable.
There’s nothing in here that’s earth-moving. It’s all very simple. Sit down to the page and do your writing. Hold the judgments, comparisons, perfectionism, and endless tweaking. Your only job is to give the words a place to go.
And yet, it requires work — work that I’m committed to (and because you’re reading this I have a feeling you are too).
Here’s what I did to put my writing first:
Blocked time on my calendar throughout the week
Staying accountable by sharing my progress with my writing community and newsletter subscribers
Added it to my to-do list — at the very top
Sending reports of my word count updates to my coach
My writing community — we all declare what we’re working on at the start of each session
Even as the leader of the writing community I created, I was doing a fine job of getting others to do their writing, but not me.
I wanted to help them, and help myself — knowing that when I help myself, I’ll be better able to help them too.
The answer was getting on a 2-hour video call with my online community members. They’re all business owners in there so they understand the challenges of putting their writing work first. People-pleasing runs deep (and I’m Canadian, so I totally get it), and I need to put myself and my work first before I can support others. Actually, I think it’s irresponsible to serve and serve and serve others without looking after myself, my creativity, and my body.
Inside the writing community, once you’ve said hello and declared what you're going to write, you’re going to look like an asshat if you sit there and do jack-shit. Eventually, with nothing else to do — you write! That’s what writing community members do, and that’s what I did too.
I focused on finishing a big round of revisions to my 70,000-word nonfiction book, and got it done with the accountability and support from being on camera with my community.
With a little support, you might be surprised with what you can write, (and sell) yourself.
Wanna see?
Read the next page.
Next: Part 5 (of 6) You can DIY your own copy
SUBTEXT
Writer’s block is bullshit. You’re not blocked. You’re either empty or you’re full.
The only way out is through — writing a pile of words without judgment is how you find flow.
Changes are pretty high that you’re not writing and you feel crappy about it.
