One of the most popular excuses that people give me about why they are not blogging and why they are not communicating more with their clients in the correct way, is because they cannot write.
Now to be honest I can’t think of anyone who can’t really write and not only can you write, you are a better writer than you think!
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A couple of weeks ago, we had on Steve Chou. He is a fantastic blogger who hates writing. He used to write every day and then he weaned himself off to every couple of days and eventually got it down once a week.
He has been writing on his blog MyWifeQuitHerJob.com for a number of years now and very consistent. Great writing.
He doesn’t like it at all but he can write and he is an engineer by trade, so he doesn’t have to write for his job. He designs microprocessors. But you can do it and you’re better than you think.
Now it’s probably because you haven’t written in a formal manner since you left school or you don’t think you have.
Yes – You Can Write
But think about it. Have you ever sent an email?
Excuse me don’t give me that, yes you have! You’ve written an email. Do you ever sit as you are about to reply and think, “oh my gosh! I’m unable to write”? No! You don’t.
Have you ever sent a text? Yeah, text writing may be different, but if you look at most people, most people are not young kids and they write normally in texts.
I bet you’ve done one, you sent one. Have you ever posted on Facebook or commented on something? You have written.
Now have you ever been at a dinner party or down at a pub or at a bar or at a restaurant involved with friends or with family and got into a conversation yes you have, so you are able to communicate!
Tools for Writing
So once you can communicate, you have two choices: you can either write, that means with a pen or pencil and paper or a pad or you can do it electronically.
You can obviously write in Microsoft Word, google docs, which is free comes with Gmail and Evernote which is also free, the basic one and there is lots of other things.
There is also one drive from Microsoft and its loads of apps for writing but to be honest, Evernote is great and google docs just saves it and you don’t have to worry.
So you can do that or you can record yourself. Now, you may be thinking that you have to speak into one of these little recording devices that lawyers use but no you don’t.
You’ve probably got a smart phone. You’ve probably got an android phone or an iPhone and if you look at the bottom of your iPhone, next to the spacebar on the keyboard at the bottom, it has a little microphone.
If you press that, you can actually dictate into it. There are better dictation tools , but I don’t use them — I just use my phone, so there plenty of ways of recording for free.
There are bits of software that will automatically take the recording and convert it to text. Some of those may not be great.
You can record into an mp3 on your computer just if you’ve got a program called quick time. You can just setup a recording and just speak to your computer and record it, doesn’t have to be good.
You can then get that transcribed. Now how much does it cost to get a transcription? Go to fiverr.com, and you’ll find people who’ll actually transcribe up to 15 minutes within 24 hours for 5$. Yes!
Now some of these, when they come back are not brilliant. But if they are not, if they are just one big block of text with no paragraphs or anything, just send it back, just say, oh, that is not very good! They’ll do it again. Break it up.
Take this podcast for instance — iwill be transcribed afterwards and it’ll be on the page. But generally when you speak audibly like this, with no script, when you read back what you’ve said, it doesn’t read very well so it needs a little edit but that is a starting point for you.
Get that back, read it and then just edit it, just change it. It doesn’t take long or you can go back to fiverr and pay another 5$ for an editor who’ll do it for you.
These people do it professionally and it doesn’t take 5 minutes to do this and show you all the changes. You’ll get it back, you can approve and you can.
Here’s Why You Really Need to Be Writing
It’s so simple and you can talk about anything but what I recommend, the reason for this, is because you need to be writing emails to communicate with your client and your potential clients.
You also need to be writing quotations to communicate with your client and your potential clients and you need to be blogging and you need to be writing about your industry and about what you do and so on and with the videos and pictures and things.
It’s not that hard but you are coming up with excuses and you don’t need them. Honestly it’s much easier than you think and once you’ve written out all these things you’re going to think, but I was never good at school I, or you might think, I was good at school but I write like a Shakespeare novel or, and no one’s going to read that.
So there are tools. These are free. Go to grammerly.com, and it’ll figure out if you spell it wrong. Go there, you can put your text into there. In fact you can even write it in there and it’ll point out all the grammar mistakes.
It’ll point out the spelling if you’ve got “there and their” wrong or if you are missing a comma or you’ve put the comma in wrong place or you are missing a capital letter. It can do that for you and it’s free.
After you’ve gone through that, go to another free tool called hemingwayapp.com but its free you just paste your thing in, you go to the site and it’s got some dummy text in there.
Just highlight it all, just press ctrl+A on your computer and press delete, it’ll clear that then paste your text in and it’ll tell you what is the good stuff and what is bad, what needs changing up a bit.
Just do what it says. See, running out of excuses eh!
Monday Book Recommendation
And then even better, as it’s a Monday, why not read a book on it? There, previously I recommended “Everybody writes” by Ann Handley, which is a great book.
But today we’ve got another one. Now this is by Ray Edwards, this is almost going to be a Ray Edward’s week, kind of.
Ray Edwards is one of the world’s top paid online copy writers. Copy writers are writers that write all the stuff when you’re buying those sales letters you get in, from direct mail or from, that make you, temptation to buy stuff that you didn’t even know you wanted, those are copy writers.
Ray Edwards is one of the best.
Now tell you what, we’ve got an interview with him on Wednesday. He is such a nice bloke. I couldn’t help tell him, he is great.
But his book is simply called “How to Write Copy That Sells”. It’s a step-by-step guide to writing fast, easy to read, effective copy.
It’s for everyone who needs to write copy that brings in cash. Did that make you interested? Including copy writers, freelancers, entrepreneurs, business owners. It gives you techniques for email marketing, techniques for website writing, techniques for social media.
Who won’t need to be doing that? It also has info for writing sale pages and adverts! You might even had a yellow page or something, how to write those, direct mail! Uh it’s brilliant! And it’s new out.
It is a really good book. When I last looked at Amazon, every single review is a 5-star review and Ray, really is a good writer, honestly!
So, go and get that. And if you want to get that for free, that book from Amazon, sent to you at my expense, anywhere in the world — no postage, no cost, no nothing. Go to www.MarketingForOwners.com/freebook and it’ll explain what you have to do. I’ll send you them all.
I will be back tomorrow. You can now start writing. We going to talk more about this about blogging and why you need to be writing on Thursday, but I’ll have some good stuff for you tomorrow.
