The blank page is a big obstacle almost every writer faces on almost every piece. You can play an important role in helping your writer over the hump, and get better writing in the bargain.

Every piece that your marketing communications writer sends you started out as a cursor blinking on a completely empty screen.

Whether he had an idea of what he was going to write or not, he stared at the blank page for a while and tried to come up with something good for you, something that would impress you and show that he understood your business. Most of all, he tried to figure out the best way to start so that the rest would be easy.

This isn’t writer’s block or any other writer’s disease. It’s just the hump that most writers need to overcome on almost every piece they write for you.

Although the hump is not your problem, getting good content from your writer is your problem.

Getting Over the Writing Hump

Without interfering in the process of writing, you can give the writer more of what he needs to get over the hump:

1. More details about the ideal readers. Why is it so much easier to write valuable content for a loved one than for a stranger? It’s because you know what is important to her, how to phrase it and how she’ll react to it. The more information you give your writer about your ideal readers, the better he understands how to make your point. If you know the profile of your ideal readers well enough, and convey that profile to your writer, he can turn a white paper or case study into a love letter to them.
2. A decent story. Which is more interesting: a new product announcement or the story behind the new product? Most marketing managers make the mistake of telling their writers, “We need a paper on our new cosmodemonic flubgrubbers. It should be about 1500 words long. I’ll send you background information and the engineer’s phone number.” What kind of story will come of that? You want people to read and remember the “once upon a time…” that they’ll tell their friends. If you give your writer the story that you want back, he’ll know how to start telling it.
3. The call to action. What do you want the ideal readers to do at the end of the paper? Pick up the phone? Go to a Website? Click on a link? Pass it on? Send you money? Most marketing managers don’t even think about the call to action, which is why most marcomm pieces don’t even have a For More Information section at the end. If you don’t have anything to tell your readers to do at the end, then that’s exactly what they’ll do. If you tell your writer where you want your readers to go, it will be easier for him to start building the road that takes them there.

Remember: Overcoming this hump is not your problem; a professional writer knows how to overcome it himself. But you can play a role in helping him overcome it, and get better writing in the process.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: The U.S. Army

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Writing for diagrams

Graphics and diagrams are at the heart of good marketing communications, but your writer can’t always make them work for a written piece.

The deadline loomed, and still I had no more than an outline from the writer. “What’s taking so long?” I asked.

“I think I have writer’s block,” replied the writer.

“You don’t believe in writer’s block,” I said. “Your Website says so.”

“I’m having trouble wrapping the business-benefits message and the graphical overviews and everything you want me to cover into a single package that somebody will bother to read,” she said. “There are several ideas you want me to describe, and the presentation diagrams from the engineers are not conceptual enough. They dive into platform repositories and toolsets without explaining overall workflow, let alone business advantages.”

I hate it when that happens.

“So, what is slowing you down?” I asked.

“The diagrams describe only the front of the elephant,” she answered. “This paper has to describe the front, back, top, bottom and middle of the elephant. I’m trying to do that with the diagrams I have, but it doesn’t work.”

“Do you know how you want the diagrams to look in order to fit with your text?” I asked.

“I need some time to flesh them out.”

The writer took about 4 hours to redesign the diagrams on pencil and paper, then met with the engineers who had designed the graphics. “I’m telling a different story from the one you told,” she explained to them, “but I need to make sure that I’m getting it right. It won’t match your story, but it needs to be consistent with it.”

The engineers dutifully looked at the drawings. “That’s not how we would explain the workflow,” they commented, “but it’s not wrong.”

While the writer modified the draft around the updated diagrams, we had a designer polish them up. The mixture of the two was a better fit for the ideal readers: technically advanced people to whom we were introducing mid-stream changes (and trying to convince them to get off the dime and adopt).

The moral: Hire a writer who is not afraid to pull out a pencil and paper and say, “I can’t explain it to fit your drawing. Let me show you how I can explain it.”

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: gigile

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It’s not easy to keep your content machine fed, is it?

You’re finding out that providing valuable content to your readers really does take some work, doesn’t it?

When you were a kid, responsible for the family dog, your mom would holler up the staircase, “Timmy! It’s time to feed the dog again!” You remember that, don’t you? There’s a cosmic reason that “dog” rhymes with “blog,” and your responsibility is nearly the same.

Whether it’s the company blog or a content marketing campaign or even an e-newsletter, somebody has to write the stuff, somebody has to chase the stuff and somebody has to keep it moving along. Those somebodies are usually you, the marketing manager.

You begin to get a bit disillusioned.

• If you haven’t yet seen results, you’re wondering, “When should I pull the plug?”
• If you’re seeing results, you’re wondering, “How do I keep this up?”

Here are three things you need to remember when you get tired of feeding the blog:

1. You need to work with People who Love to Write. Even if you hire a writer to generate content about your niche technology for deep packet inspection and pay her handsomely, she can get tired of it in a hurry and run out of things to say and ways in which to say them. A true Lover of Writing will not suffer from this disease.
2. You need to Write for the Audience. Actually, if you’re not writing for the audience – for its questions and worries and headaches – then what’s the point? You can feed the blog candy just to see it get fat, or you can feed it something nutritious that will preserve it and increase its value to the audience. Besides, the more you know about your audience, the easier it is to keep your blog fed.
3. You, your company and your writers need to Write About What You Know About, and you need to be prepared to convey it persuasively for months, maybe for years. I came across this point in an article by Lloyd Brown last week:
   

   If you try to discuss the benefits of the acai berry when your only knowledge is what you read on another blog, the broader community is going to realize that you have nothing unique to offer. All they have done is burned a little of your bandwidth. Even worse is the abundance of blogs that simply import RSS feeds from other blogs to provide content. If you want visitors to stay longer than a few seconds and return at a later time, you must give them a reason. This means providing original content. The only way you can do this is if you know your subject.

Your blog won’t fetch sticks the way your dog did, but a well-fed one will fetch leads and attention. And, you don’t need to give it a bath.

photo credit: SpaceRitual

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Here’s a shortlist, happily unencumbered by research but underpinned by years of dealing with writers.

1. Go dark. How about those writers who “run silent, run deep,” don’t return your calls or e-mail, and pop back onto radar when you least expect it? Are you breathlessly relieved to hear from them again, or put out?
2. Overturn your edits. You spend two hours revising a draft and changing text, then get the next draft back with most of your comments unincorporated and no explanation from the writer.
3. Pull an end-run on you. Maybe they contact somebody else in your department without your knowledge, or send e-mail to one of your customers without copying you. This is felony-dumb behavior.
4. Tell you your business. You and your team have decided how you want to use the content you’ve hired the writer to produce. The writer may suggest additional options, but only a bad writer will tell you that you’re off message or pushing a rope or missing opportunities. That’s what marketing and PR consultants are paid to evaluate.
5. Avoid discussions about money. You’re a businessperson with a budget and a boss and a finance department and a recession on your back, not to mention the need to publish content. Isn’t it helpful to you to deal squarely with a writer about things like hourly rates, fixed bids, late payments and when you can get her the check? Sure, not everybody is Howard Hughes, but these are loose ends you don’t want to leave untied. It’s easier when the writer meets you on the level about them.

These and other sins generally boil down to two factors: communication and professionalism. Writers who have mastered these lost skills of business are an asset.

The others are a pain in the…

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“Basically,” he said, “Mrs. Correia doesn’t want us to use words like ‘very’ or ‘like’ or ‘many’ or ‘lots of’… words that don’t really add any value. She also doesn’t want us to, like, begin sentences with ‘basically.’”

Like basically, I agree, so I’m getting dead words out of our copy – cold turkey.

There are probably 2700 blogs with lists of words to avoid in business writing, so plenty of us have thought about this already. Dead words can turn decent copy into fluff. If you want to make a science of it, collect the boilerplate paragraph from the press releases of middle-tier technology companies and lump them all onto a single Web site: museumofnonsense.com.

Herewith a few:

• Best practices – Why would we mention the worst practices? I hate this expression, and I was encouraged when an engineer agreed with me in a meeting last week.
• Solution – The most overused word in technology writing. I’m galled that it occurs 12 times in a 10-page paper we published just a few months ago, but I plan to refrain from using it from now on.
• High-tech – There is no high technology anymore. It ended about 2001 when everybody got a computer.
• Leading provider – You wouldn’t want to work with a trailing one, would you? Throw it away.
• Today’s – I’ve decided I’m not going to read any piece that begins with this word, as in “Today, content professionals are tugged in multiple directions…” or “In today’s socially networked world…”
• Embraced – There’s too little embracing going on in the world right now, so let’s use “adopted” or “accepted” and be more accurate.

Runners-up:

• Resources – I don’t like this word, but it’s pretty hard to work around it. Usually, though, what we mean is “money,” so perhaps I should be more frank in the future.
• Support – Long in the tooth, but another tough one to get around. If there were a better way to say “Windows XP supports remote desktop management,” I’d use it.
• Business-critical/mission-critical – In other words, “Pay attention to the next noun – it’s important!” I think I can get away without these; if not, I’ll post and let you know.

So, I’m notifying my writers that I’ll assume they have a writer’s disease and deduct points if they use these dead words in copy they send me.

Also, I don’t understand why people pronounce it “processeeze.” Does that make it high-tech?

Basically, that’s another post.

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She wrote:

“I’m just now in the marketing phase of my freelance copywriting business. How can I get past the ‘no experience and small portfolio’ problem to even get people to call me? I need to get hired to get experience, but no one will hire me because I have no experience.”

I’ve seen a lot of writers go through this – for that matter, I went through it, though I didn’t let it slow me down – and I always feel like Patton, smacking the soldier who was worried about losing the war. I went for a walk around the block to calm down, then I replied:

“Under the circumstances, you should assume that no prospects will call you spontaneously (but you should be happily surprised if they do) and that YOU will have to go to prospects, either by cold calling or attending industry events or other avenues of contact. You should also put together a small Web site, but don’t sink big money into it, and don’t expect that the whole world will suddenly visit it.

“When you find the person who needs content, one of his/her first questions will be, ‘Can you show me some samples?’ That’s where your prior work comes in. Be sure it’s clean, presentable and easily accessible. Do NOT apologize for anything about it; samples are rarely a perfect fit to the prospect’s need, and if that need is great enough, and the prospect likes the way you present yourself, then s/he will decide whether it’s a good fit.”

Of course, there’s a lot I leave out – mostly because it’s up to the happy interaction between what man proposes and what the universe disposes – but this is one of the first steps in getting business. I want to shake a lot of good writers by the lapels and tell them this.

How do writers get your business?

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I suppose some writers have remarkable memories and capture everything needed to write up the content into an article or paper. They’re a technical version of those waiters who can remember every detail of an order from a party of twelve, who wants the veal rare, who doesn’t want ice in her water, and which dressing everybody wants on his/her respective greens.

I can’t do that. Can you?

Some of my writers take copious notes and begin writing the piece in their brains while the interview is still underway. My father-in-law was a journalist who used to do that, then drive home and dictate the story over the phone to a transcriptionist. What a gift.

Other writers – like me – use a digital recorder. Interviewees don’t mind, as long as you observe their rights and let them know you’re recording them. We take notes furiously, jotting the time at particularly valuable utterances for verbatim transcription later, and fervently hoping that the batteries don’t die before the interview is over.

The hardware is relatively cheap and more reliable than tape, especially for writers who move the files to a PC. Sony makes excellent software for moving through and transcribing text quickly.

I talked to my colleague and high school classmate, Gene Gable, about using a recorder. “You’ve got to get out of that habit,” he counseled. “It seems like a good idea until – as happened to me – something goes wrong technically and you realize that you haven’t given your brain enough credit, and your notes aren’t sufficient and there’s a deadline on your heels. If you take good notes and you’re not distracted by things like today’s prime rate or your Twitter account, you’ll find it’s not that hard to build a good piece without the recorder.”

What do you think? Can you tell the difference between a piece written from memory and one written from a recording?

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One writer has done several projects for us: three case studies and a white paper in the past few months. We were on a call to review a draft of the paper the other day when I casually posed that question.

He laughed out loud and quoted American humorist S.J. Perelman: “I loathe writing. On the other hand I’m a great believer in money.”

After we’d all had a good chuckle, he paused and sheepishly asked, “Does this draft make it look as though I’m tired of writing?”

“No,” my colleague offered. “Not at all.”

Do you get tired of writing? If so, what do you do?

• Pull out your latest mortgage statement?
• Close your eyes and pray?
• Look into your dog’s eyes and realize you may not be the person she thinks you are?
• Phone your kid and ask whether he’s making enough to support you yet?
• Take a nap?
• Open another fifth of scotch?

Life is hard. Then you write.

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