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One More Method to Breaking Writer’s Block

Yesterday, I shared six methods for breaking through writer’s block. But I forgot one of my most favorite ones.

Writer's Block

If you find you’re stuck for a way to explain something or can’t quite figure out a direction of a story or article, explain it to a friend. I mean actually sit down face-to-face with someone and tell them what you’re trying to accomplish. If necessary, pull out paper and pen, and diagram what you’re talking about.

I’ve often found that in order to be able to put my thought process into words, I have to be able to crystallize my thoughts. It causes all the thoughts that are pinballing around my head to get into formation, and I can express them clearly and logically.

Once I do that, I get unstuck for what I’m trying to say, and everything makes sense. I will occasionally pop open my laptop or notebook and scribble down the thoughts in a brief outline, which I can go back to later. It especially helps if I have several minutes after talking to that person to put everything down in a complete idea dump, which I can go back and fix later.

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Six Sure-Fire Methods to Break Writer’s Block

A lot of writers suffer from writer’s block. That big mental wall that sometimes get in the way of getting any writing done. But it doesn’t have to be permanent. Only a few times have people suffered career-ending writer’s block, but when that happens, we’ve gone beyond just plain ol’ writer’s block, and are getting into some serious performance anxiety.

Here are six sure-fire methods you can use to break through your own writer’s block.Erik Deckers' Moleskine & Coffee Tumbler

  • Carry a notebook with you at all times: I keep a little black Moleskine notebook and pen with me close at hand. Whenever I have an idea or a thought that I know I’ll want to use later, I write it down. If I have several minutes, I’ll write as much as I can about the idea that inspired me. Oftentimes, when I’m stuck for a topic or struggling with an idea, I’ll pull out the notebook and refer to what I’ve already written. Or if I’ve written enough, the material from the notebook is what I needed in the first place. I just transcribe it and clean it up.
  • Write something else: Most writers I know get hung up on one particular project. They can’t write this blog post, they can’t write that article. So write something else. If you’re a professional writer, or even a persistent amateur, there’s always something else to write. So write that instead. It often gets the juices flowing, and you can break the block. When you feel it break, immediately switch over to the project you were stuck on.
  • Write it in an email instead: Most writers seem to get stuck because they’re writing for posterity. They’re thinking not only of The Reader, but The Reader in 50 Years. I don’t know how many journals and notebooks I started and then trashed because I thought, “what if my grandchildren read this in 50 years” or “what if someone wants to study my writings in 100 years? What will they find?” I immediately froze up, got two entries into the journal, and then quit. I lost count of the notebooks I’ve pitched because of this.
    If this happens to you, regardless of what you’re writing, write it in an email instead. Start it out with “Dear Mom, this is something I’m working on right now.” Then write your project/article/blog post to your mom. We love our moms, and they love us. But they don’t always get what we’re working on. So write this in terms your mom will understand. Then, go back and delete the greeting, and you’ve got your piece. Stop writing for The Reader and The Future Reader. Write for yourself. And your mom. And call her once in a while, she misses you.
  • Pick a different environment: I have two offices. My regular office and my favorite coffee shop. Some weeks see me in one office more than the other. And there are times that being in one place or the other is not conducive to getting work done. So I go to the other office. The change in environment is often enough to jolt me out of my stuckness. But if it doesn’t work — and I can usually feel the torpor coming on — I’ll go somewhere completely different. A different coffee shop, a friend’s office (Tip: Make sure they own the business. Don’t stop by your friend’s place inside the giant corporate building.) The new setting is usually enough to jolt me out of my complacency and get my creative juices flowing again.
  • Write nonsense:I’ve never been a fan of writing exercises to get warmed up. This isn’t running. I’m not going to injure my brain if I don’t write something “creative” before I start real writing. But that doesn’t mean there’s not some validity to just writing complete and utter crap for the first 20 minutes. If you’re stuck on a particular topic, write stream-of-consciousness stuff about your subject, maybe even the piece itself. As you write, do it in an over-the-top voice and style, like Sideshow Mel from The Simpsons. As you do this, you’ll find yourself breaking through the block and starting to write some real material. But don’t delete the crap. Cut-and-paste it into another document, and then go back and read it a couple days later. You may find some nuggets worth keeping.
  • Quit waiting to be inspired: Once you become a professional writer, you don’t have the luxury of having writer’s block. You also don’t have the luxury of “being inspired” or “waiting for the right moment.” Real writers don’t get inspired. Real writers plant their asses in their chairs and start writing. If the words aren’t coming, try one of the other five things I mentioned. If they still aren’t coming, put your head down, and keep writing. They’ll come to you eventually.
    Most professional writers ignore the writer’s block, because they have a job to do, and they do what they need to to get it done. There’s no such thing as an accountant’s block, where the figures just don’t add up. Or a chemist’s block, because they can’t get the formulas right. When you reach this level of writing, the words just come automatically, like breathing and eating. You may have times where your work is better, but as a professional writer, even your “good enough” should be pretty good.

What about you serious writers? How do you break through writer’s block? How do you prevent it? Has anything worked or not worked? And did any of those involve alcohol?

Update: After I wrote this post, I thought of one more method to breaking writer’s block, which I published the following day.

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5 Changes to Make to Your Blog After Google Panda 3.3

Google Panda 3.3 has caught some people off-guard and made a lot of SEO professionals freak out. After perusing SEOMoz’s discussions on the matter — these are the guys who do SEO for a living — it seems no one really knows what Panda 3.3 has done to their sites. I just know a lot of people aren’t happy about it.

There was one particular change, out of 40, that has everyone freaked out: “Link evaluation: We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.”

Now, no one knows for sure what it means, but chances are, if you have been relying on a backlinking strategy to increase your search engine ranking, or you’re painfully agonizing over your anchor text’s keywords, that may become a problem for you in a few days or weeks. We’ll have to see.

In Wednesday’s post, I discussed four changes Panda 3.3 is bringing to bloggers.

  • Improvements to freshness: Google can put fresh content in their results more quickly. Newer posts, articles, and pages are found more easily. This means the quicker you are in hopping on a trending topic, the more likely you are to win search.
  • Consolidation of signals for spiking topics: They can see when a new topic is spiking in popularity, and makes it easier to identify in realtime. If you search for breaking news, you’ll be able to find it sooner, and start writing about it.
  • Improved local results: They can more easily detect whether search queries and the results are local to you. If you search for “Topeka plumber,” and you’re sitting in Topeka, they’ll make sure you see those results first.
  • Link evaluation: This is the big one that’s freaking SEOs out.

Based on these four important changes, what kinds of changes can/should you make to your blog to take advantage of the Google Panda 3.3 update, as well as past updates over the last 12 months? These are five long-term changes you need to start making right now, and make as a part of your regular blogging habit.

1. Focus on local content whenever possible.

If you own a local business, or you’re a local businessperson, you need to write about your business in your city whenever possible. If you’re a real estate agent, write posts about real estate in your city. “How to Stage Your Minneapolis Home Before a Showing,” “Five Things To Fix Before Your Next Minneapolis Home Inspection.” Be sure to use the name of the city in the body copy too.

Learn the html schema code for your particular data types, and tag the appropriate content. (More on schemas in a minute).

2. Use the rel=author tag in your Author bio, point it at your Google+ profile.

First, make sure you have a Google+ profile. (There’s plenty of stuff out there about why you should be using it, so I won’t go into that here. Just know that it’s especially important to SEO now.)

Next, make sure that every blog post you write, whether it’s your own or a guest post, links back to the Google+ profile, and uses the “rel=author” tag. Here’s an example:

<a href=”http://bit.ly/xyLk6s” rel=”author”>Erik Deckers</a>

Hint: By shortening your Google+ profile link with Bitly, it gives you another analytics measurement point. If you really want to get creative, use campaign codes with each article you publish or guest publish, and you can see what kind of click-through traffic you’re getting from a post to your profile.

3. Use schemas whenever possible.

Schemas are a new web classification system created by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Among other things, this is going to help with local search, as well as personal branding, because you can add your city and your name to your blog posts. This will help Google and the other search engines identify you and your town. You’re going to get a boost in local results and a boost on searches for your name.

There are a few hundred schema types, and you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to learn and use them all. In the meantime, there are plugins to use, and you can also identify a few useful schema tags for yourself to use on a regular basis.

For example, if you’re using the PostalAddress schema, to tell Google “this is my local address,” you would write:

<span itemprop=”streetAddress”>5348 Tacoma Ave.</span>
<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Indianapolis</span>,
<span itemprop=”addressRegion”>IN</span>
<span itemprop=”postalCode”>46220</span>

We’re starting to use schemas here at Pro Blog Service, but we’re still learning the best ways to use it, and are limiting ourselves mostly to the SchemaFeed plugin for WordPress. Suffice to say, schema is a giant, complex system, and by using it only for blog posts, it’s like using a race car to drive down the block. Still, we’re just bloggers, so what do you want?

We’ll have more about using schemas for blogs in a future post. For more information in the meantime, visit Schema.org.

4. Fix your grammar and punctuation errors

One of the changes that Panda has wrought, starting back when it was first introduced was, that it even started looking at grammar and punctuation errors. While Google has not said they are evaluating pages for grammar and punctuation quality, we have discussed in the past how they are looking at user-generated indicators — time on site, bounce rate, click-through rate — to determine the quality of a blog or website. If your page is filled with errors, and visitors don’t like reading what you wrote, they won’t stick around for very long, and Google will determine that your page must not be a good one.

The same is true for the quality of your writing. If you’re a good writer, or even a fairly passable writer, you have nothing to worry about. If your writing has all the quality of a 10,000 word conspiracy theory manifesto that was written at 3 am in someone’s parents’ basement, then you’re going to have problems.

5. Don’t worry so much about anchor text and backlinks

Like I’ve said, no one is sure exactly what Google meant by “we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.” Some people think it means anchor text is no longer a factor, other people think it means they have devalued backlinks. Google already devalued backlinks when they first released Panda, but others have tested this and found that links still carry some weight.

We do know that Google has been seriously knocking many of these link farms and poor quality sites that did nothing but create thousands upon thousands of backlinks. Any SEO strategies that were built on this tactic are now (or soon will be) on the scrap heap, completely useless.

If you have been knocking yourself out trying to earn backlinks and you agonize over anchor text, you may want to pull back a little on it. Don’t give up on it yet, because until someone knows for sure which indicator has been shut off, it’s still a viable strategy. All we’re saying is don’t give yourself an aneurysm trying to figure out exactly the right keywords and placing all the right backlinks in all the right places.

While these five changes are rather involved, they’re going to be important in the coming months as Google continues to force us to focus more on the quality of our writing and content, and less on the automated SEO strategies that many people have been employing as a way to game the system.

If you’ve already been writing good stuff, and earning your links organically, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re good to go. Keep up the good work.

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Four Important Changes Google Panda 3.3 is Bringing to Bloggers

Google Panda has been the bane or boon of every serious blogger and SEO professional, provided they can remember the difference between bane and boon (bane = bad; boon = good). While most regular bloggers and web people were unaffected, it was the power SEO users (and spammers) who were greatly affected by the changes. Many of the professionals saw their analytics and search engine rankings plummet after Panda was introduced.

Several days ago, Google’s newest algorithm update, 3.3 (codename: goddammit so much!), has given us 40 new changes for the month, ranging from improved local search results to improving SafeSearch results to tweaking the Turkish weather results.

Some of the major developments that affect us as bloggers — Turkish weather results notwithstanding — are:

  • Improvements to freshness: We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
  • Consolidation of signals for spiking topics: We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
  • Improved local results: We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.
  • Link evaluation: We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

(Note: these are just four of the 40. I borrowed their descriptions, and you will have to look through the entire list to find them. The one on Link Evaluation is near the bottom.)

Some basic implications I can see right off the bat:

  • Freshness = regular updates. Once a week is barely going to be enough to move the needle. You may need to publish 2 – 3 times a week.
  • Spiking topics means if you can stay on top of, and write about, trends the day they happen, that would help you be a big part of the conversation. Read David Meerman Scott’s ebook Newsjacking (affiliate link) for more information on how to that.
  • If you have any kind of local focus, start writing about your city and naming it when you can. Taht tells Google your content is locally specific.
  • Don’t knock yourself out on linking strategies. It’s important, but it’s a whooooole lot less important than it was two years ago.

This last improvement is what has a lot of people worried. We don’t know what exactly the link analysis was (Google never tells), whether it affects backlinks by shutting them down completely, turns of title tags within links, or whether they’re going to send a flaming bag of dog poo to your house if your anchor text and <H1> title tag don’t match. But you can be sure that a lot of SEO pros will be checking it out.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss five ways these four changes will (or should) affect your blog.

Photo credit: jlantzy (Flickr)

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Writers, Your Biggest Competition Isn’t Other Writers, It’s Mediocrity

About 20 years ago, I used to sell high end stereos. Across the street in our small city was another high end stereo store.

The first time their sales manager walked in the door and started talking with our sales manager like they were good friends, I was surprised. After the guy left, I asked my manager why he was so friendly with the competition.

“He’s not the competition,” he said.

“How do you figure?” I asked.

“Because our competition is the Big Box store a few few miles away.”

He explained that our high end stereo store, whose low end components were a $400 Yamaha receiver and a small pair of $300 speakers, appealed to audiophiles and people who could appreciate the quality of a really good stereo system. The store across the street sold different brand names, but equally high quality.

The difference between a great photographer or writer and an acceptable one? Skills, experience, and knowledge.

Big Box, however, sold $179 receivers and giant speakers for $120 a pair. (To put it in perspective, you could walk out with a $12,000 system from our store; the most you could spend at Big Box was about $800.)

They were our real competition, because we had to convince the price shoppers who showed up on a Saturday that there truly was a difference in the sound quality between ours and Big Box’s, and that the bouncy lights on the front of the cheap stereo didn’t actually do anything for the sound quality. (You wouldn’t believe how many people I tried to talk out of the bouncy lights.)

They didn’t hear the difference. They believed a stereo was a stereo, and while, yes, ours was very good, they could get a whole stereo with bouncy lights for a fraction of the price we wanted for an average receiver. Of course, they were disappointed when they got home, and they realized the music just didn’t sound as good as it did in our store.

It’s the same problem we writers face. Too many times, we talk to potential blogging clients who think writing is writing. They’ve found a writer who will work at a fraction of our price — sure they live in another part of the world, and English is their third or fourth language, but, you know, they charge a lot less — or their nephew got an A on his senior English paper, and knows a lot about the Internet, and he’s going to do the whole project for $75 and a Starbucks gift card.

Our biggest competition isn’t other writers, it’s people who think that writing is writing. That stringing coherent sentences together is so easy, a monkey can do it. After all, they reason, we learned it in high school, so how hard can it be?

Recently, I was talking to Paul D’Andrea, a professional photographer friend, who said he faces the same thing. Despite the years of study and practice, and the thousands of dollars of equipment he carts around his biggest competition is not another equally good photographer. It’s the guy with a $200 digital camera or the latest and greatest mobile phone. (Paul took the leaf photo in this post. You can’t do that with a cell phone.)

After all, they reason, you just point and shoot. Don’t cut off the heads, crank up the flash, and hit the little button with your right index finger. How hard can it be?

I may have a decent camera, but I realize that even Paul’s “average” work has a level of mastery I’ll never achieve. If I ever want good photos, I need someone like Paul. And if someone wants good writing, they can’t just hire a college senior and expect expert-level writing.

Unfortunately for writers, while the Internet has made it possible to reach more customers from a wider base, it’s also created a problem for us. Now anyone with a laptop and a rudimentary command of the English language can hang out a shingle and call themselves a writer.

If you want to demonstrate your writing ability, you need high-quality samples, strong testimonials, and be able to demonstrate how your writing has succeeded and benefitted your clients. Be able to measure ROI, sales, and even regular readership. Show search engine placement and rankings. List writing awards. And most importantly, show whether businesses have made money by working with you.

Look, anyone can take pictures with even the crappiest cameras. Anyone can write copy with a laptop and an 8th grade education. That doesn’t mean it’s any good. Sadly, it also doesn’t mean that people will recognize its lack of quality either.

It’s going to take some work on your part, writers and photographers, to educate your potential clients as to why all writing isn’t the same, why your work is better than everyone else’s, and why you’re worth the higher price tag.

Photo credit: Paul D’Andrea (Flickr)

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Five Steps for New Pro Athletes to Establish Their Personal Brand

Professional athletes may have one of the easiest times in their personal branding, but they need to take advantage of it, if they want to leverage their name, their skills, and the draw that comes from being on a pro team.

However, unless sportscasters on ESPN are talking about you going first or second in the draft, you’ve got an uphill battle to fight.

I was recently working with a young pro athlete who is still in the early stages of his career, and is starting to build his personal brand in the community. That’s smart. This is the right time to do it, and he’s starting at just the right time. But like most young athletes, you don’t have your own publicist or agent who can take care of these things for you. Or you have a team publicist who can lend you a hand, but you’ll end up doing most of this yourself.

These are the first five steps any new professional athlete, regardless of sport, team, or league, should take to grow their own personal brand.

1. Get a photo of you in action.

Whether it’s you on the court, the field, the track, or wherever — practicing or playing — get a photo of you “at the office.” You already want to be known for your particular sport, so make sure you make it part of your personal brand by making it your avatar on all your social networks. If you’re playing on a team, ask your team publicist for one. If you don’t have one, hire a professional photographer to help you out.

Make sure you get a good shot that lets people know it’s you — your uniform number, your face, or if you’re a race car driver, your car. (And frankly, if you can get a shot with you and your team’s marquis player in it — assuming that’s not already you — that’s even better.)

Speedy Dan Clarke

2. Be active on Twitter

Dan Clarke (@SpeedyDanClarke is an open wheel (IndyCar) and NASCAR truck racer in Indianapolis. He is constantly using Twitter to talk with fans who are following him (and who he’s following back), and to promote the different events where he’ll be driving. Whether it’s a race, a test, or even a course he’s trying out, Dan keeps his fans abreast of what he’s up to. The upside of this is that if he can continue to build his network of fans, he’s more likely to win sponsors so he has a ride this year, because he can show them his legions of loyal fans. Just like a book publisher who is interested in self-published authors who have already sold a lot of books, a sponsor would be interested in an athlete who can bring a lot of fans along with him or her.

3. Set up a Facebook PAGE

Not a profile. A profile is your personal page. That’s how you’re going to talk to family and friends. But you’ll want to keep your fans a healthy distance away, so set your Facebook profile to a pseudonym (e.g. use your first name and your mom’s maiden name) so only your friends can find you.

Your Facebook page is like a public profile, where you can interact with fans, but they can’t see the stuff you’re talking about with family. Be sure to communicate with your fans on a regular basis, so they can feel like you’re involved with them, but they’re not personally involved.

4. Establish a Wikipedia page.

As an athlete, you’re more likely to get a Wikipedia page accepted by the editors of Wikipedia than non-athletes will. Ask your team publicist to help you start it. Be sure they understand the rules of Wikipedia before you start the page: completely objective language. The copy needs to be written like a real encyclopedia. That means “really boring.” In other words, they can’t sound like the player profiles in the program.

5. Start a blog

A lot of people roll their eyes at this, because they hate writing, but a blog may be one of the most important personal branding tools you have. You need a blog as a place for people to find more information about you. Remember, you’re in this not only so you can become famous, but so sponsors can find you. So people who want to pay you a few thousand dollars to speak to their group can find you. So fans who want to learn more can find you.

Your best bet — hire a social media consultant for help on this — is to do the following:

  1. Buy your name as a domain name from GoDaddy or Domains.com. If you can’t get your name, get your name and your uniform number: DallasClark44.com, for example.
  2. Set up a free blog at WordPress.com. Better yet, get your social media person to set up a WordPress blog on an external server. (If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, just tell your social media person, “Erik says I need a self-hosted WordPress blog.” If they don’t know what that is, they’re not the ones to help you. Find someone who knows how to create WordPress blogs.
  3. Point your domain at your WordPress blog. Put this domain on your card (see #6) and on any information you share with people. Remember, you want to drive traffic here — Twitter, your Facebook page, and any other networks are all used to drive traffic here.
  4. Pick up the book Corporate Blogging For Dummies, and start writing about things in your professional life: training, practice, games/matches. Be sure to include photos and videos.

6. Create a Player Card

Some teams do this for their players who make a lot of public appearances. They create player cards that look like Topps baseball cards, which they sign and hand out to kids whenever they appear in public. If you’re not in one of those leagues, consider creating your own player card. Hire a graphic designer, hand them a few baseball cards, and ask them to recreate that. Put your social media properties on the back with your stats and very short bio.

While your card is not going to be a collector’s item that is as eagerly sought as a Johnny Bench rookie card, it’s going to be something that helps people remember who you are, and even how to get ahold of you later.