April 13, 2021

The Crucial Content Writing Step You May Be Skipping

U.S. culture (and many others) valorize hard work. We grow up steeped in the messaging that success is correlated to how hard you’re willing to work, and that developing a skill requires relentless hours of practice. And while that isn’t exactly inaccurate, it’s not the full picture.

For writers—and knowledge workers in general—the quality of your ideas and output depends on finding the right balance between work and rest. Contrary to our cultural narratives, working too hard can hurt your results. And at the same time, it can diminish your quality of life and do serious harm to your health.

This isn’t a personal opinion—it’s backed by research. Taking time for rest doesn’t make you lazy or a bad worker. It’s one of the most commonly overlooked ways to become a better writer.

5 Ways Rest Will Improve Your Content Writing

In an ideal world, knowing that rest is important for your physical and mental health would be a good enough reason to make it a priority. In the world we’re all stuck in though, rest is too often associated with personal guilt and/or accusations of laziness.

In many workplaces, managers will punish employees that take time off, and reward those who put in longer hours. But even for freelancers and business owners that work for ourselves, it’s hard to shake the idea that you’re doing something wrong when you take breaks or give yourself days off.

So, for those of you that need to hear it: rest doesn’t make you lazy. Instead, scheduling rest—being intentional about it—is a strategic move you can make to improve your business performance. And here’s why.

1. When you work too hard, your work suffers.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the more hours you work, the more you’ll get done. Actual research has proven that’s not true. Human brains and bodies have their limits. When you try to push yours past those limits, your work suffers. Not only will you produce less, but as your exhaustion increases, the work you do produce will be of lower quality.

The feelings of guilt many of us face when we take time off are illogical. Avoiding overwork isn’t the selfish, indulgent thing to do. It’s the best choice for anyone who cares about producing quality work.

2. Rest gives creativity room to grow.

If you know many creatives, then you’ve heard anecdotes about the “a ha!” moments that hit when in the shower or on a long walk. That happens for a reason. When you allow the brain periods of rest in between those of intense focus, the brain doesn’t turn off. Instead, a different part of the brain goes to work—a part that excels in creativity*.

When you’re trying so hard to make progress on a piece—staring at a blank page and just getting nowhere—sometimes the most productive move you can make is to step away and do something entirely different. A walk, exercise, a shower, cooking, playing with your pets—anything that explicitly shifts your mind away from the work.

It may feel counterintuitive, but letting your mind wander can help you accomplish more than trying to whip it into gear when you’re nearing a breaking point.

3. Rushed work gets sloppy.

When you overload your calendar, you’ll end up cramming work in when you don’t have the proper time and energy to give to it. Rushed work will be more prone to errors—from minor ones, like embarrassing typos, to bigger issues, such as pieces that lack research and get information wrong (yikes!).

If you don’t give yourself room to breath with the amount of work you schedule, the mistakes that make it into your pieces will hurt your reputation. And just as bad, they could lead your readers astray in their search for accurate, useful information.

4. Rest is required to avoid burnout.

Short periods of stress and overwork can take their toll. But once they become your norm, you face the bigger issue of burnout. And once you hit the point of burnout, not only will your health suffer, but you’ll struggle to get anything done. Work goes from feeling challenging to impossible. You go from being worn out at the end of the day, to tired all the time. And motivation will feel entirely out of reach.

In short, burnout is serious and best avoided. To keep from reaching that point and facing all the personal and career consequences that come with it, you need to start prioritizing rest before the days and weeks of overwork pile up to the point where it’s too late.

5. All work and no play makes you dull.

Unless you’re staying at a secluded, haunted hotel throughout the winter, working too hard probably won’t make you a murderer. But it does risk making you less relatable, which matters when it comes to writing. Interacting with friends and family members can produce insights you won’t get while sitting at your computer. Spending time reading books, watching movies, and following current events will keep you learning.

And the experiences you have while living life (away from work) will often come back in surprising ways that make your writing better. Maybe something that happens while walking your dog becomes the perfect anecdote to start a piece with, or a friend’s comment at a party sparks a great topic to tackle on your blog.

When all you ever do and think about is work, you lose insight into a lot of the things your audience cares about. Keeping in touch with the culture outside of your job helps you keep your writing interesting and authentic.

How to Intentionally Incorporate Rest into Your Work

Now that you have strong arguments for abolishing any guilt or hesitation you may have felt about adding more rest into your life, you need to develop specific strategies to make sure it happens.

1. Schedule in breaks.

When you’re busy (which most of us are most of the time), the idea of including a break in your day may feel impossible. But that’s why it’s important to intentionally schedule it. Treat it like a task that’s as important as any other item on your to-do list (because it is). The breaks you include in your day will make the time you spend focusing on work more productive.

And by being more intentional about the breaks you take, you’ll likely find you spend less time on unintentional breaks <cough> Twitter/Facebook/Instagram <cough>. And that means you can spend your breaks doing something you actually like. Doesn’t a walk in your neighborhood sound nicer than another twenty minutes of doomscrolling?

2. Enforce a strict line between the workday and your personal life.

Make a rule for yourself right now: when you’re done with work for the day, you’re done. No checking email on your phone while you watch TV, or taking business calls that come in while you’re trying to have dinner with family. To truly get the benefits of rest, you need time where you’re psychologically detached from your work. And a voice in the back of your head urging you to check your work email just in case will keep you from that.

You’re a writer, not an OB-GYN with clients that could go into labor at any moment (or at least, if a client does go into labor, that’s very much not your responsibility!). This isn’t a job where time-sensitive emergencies are the norm. You don’t need to be on call to do your job well. And in fact, you’ll do your job better if you let yourself be all the way off when you’re not working.

3. Take weekends (or something comparable).

For freelancers and agency owners, the line between the workweek and weekend can get blurry. But it’s important to have full days off regularly.

If you find that you prefer to take Mondays and Thursdays off to Saturdays and Sundays, that’s fine! The particulars matter less than the idea. But don’t try to work seven days a week. Make sure you leave yourself weekends to rest, spend time with loved ones, and pursue any hobbies you’re into.

4. Commit to regular vacations.

If you’re employed, use your vacation time! Don’t feel bad using the benefit you’ve earned. And don’t feel like you need to keep an eye on your email while you’re gone.

Note: I recognize that If you have an employer that requires this, you may not have much of a choice. But to the degree possible, leave work behind completely. And if you don’t have that option now, seriously consider looking for an employer who respects the value of rest.

If you work for yourself, make scheduling vacations a priority. Something a lot of people don’t realize about freelancing until they’re in it is that somehow it becomes harder to take time off when you control your own schedule. Many freelancers fall into the trap of forgetting to take vacation, or feeling like they can’t for the first few years (hi, it me). That’s a surefire path to burnout.

Communicate with your clients in advance and schedule all your deadlines to make sure they won’t interfere with the time you’ve allotted for your vacation. It really is OK to put an out-of-office message up and leave work behind for a week or two. The alternative is the real danger to your career.

5. Get comfortable saying “no” (and “not now”).

For everything else on this list to be possible without burning bridges and disappointing people, you need to avoid overcommitting. That means getting really good at using a small and simple word that is surprisingly difficult to say: no.

Don’t feel like you have to agree to everything a boss asks you to do. Don’t think you have to take on every project a client offers. Getting comfortable with saying “I don’t have the space in my calendar for that right now” takes work, but it’s important. And saying “no” doesn’t make you unprofessional. A lot of people will respect you more for showing that you know how to schedule effectively, set realistic expectations, and communicate boundaries.

Sometimes saying “no” outright is important. Other times saying “I can’t fit that in now, but could slot it in X weeks from now” will do the trick. Get in the habit of figuring out how much you can manage without going overboard, and protecting your schedule from going beyond that.

Conclusion

The internet is packed with articles about productivity hacks. But a lot of them miss this crucial part of the equation. If you’re not taking enough breaks, getting enough sleep, and keeping portions of your life entirely work-free, your productivity will dip. Your work will suffer. And you’ll hit a wall where you just can’t keep it up any more.

For the good of your personal life, your health, and your writing—take a break.

*If you want to know all the sciency stuff behind this, you can find it in the chapter on “The Problem of Rest” in the book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. It also has sections that cover a lot of the research referenced elsewhere throughout the post. [jump back up]

December 14, 2020

SEO Writing 101: Don’t Skip SERP Research

A good 90% of SEO writing is about creating content that’s valuable to the humans you hope will read it. But then there’s that other 10%—the part about understanding search engines and making sure your writing speaks to what the algorithms respond to.

And a key step in getting that 10% right (and helping with the 90% while you’re at it) is performing SERP research.

What is SERP Research?

SERP stands for search engine results page. Anytime you do a Google search, the page your search produces is the SERP for that keyword.

SERP research is performing an analysis of the SERP for a keyword you want to rank for.

Digging into the SERP for a keyword yields useful insights about how people use the keyword, what Google deems good content on the topic, and what you need to do to effectively compete in the rankings.

How to Perform a SERP Analysis

The idea of SERP research may seem straightforward enough: perform a search, see what shows up. But to do an effective SERP analysis, you want to include a few key steps in your process.

1. Google your primary keyword.

Do a search for the primary keyword you have in mind. If you have a list of a few keywords you’re targeting, or are still trying to decide between a few, go ahead and do this for all of them so you can see how the SERPs compare.

Because Google sometimes provides personalized results based on past search history, this step is best performed in an incognito or private search window.

2. Analyze the layout of the SERP.

The great aim of Google’s algorithm is to discern what the person searching wants to find, and deliver up the best possible results for their query. And because the company has massive quantities of data on people’s search habits and what they click on for each search, they do a pretty good job at understanding the intentions behind a keyword.

For marketers, analyzing the layout of a SERP can reveal valuable information on what your target audience is thinking. You want the piece you write to address what they’re looking for, and the SERP helps you better understand what that is.

Sometimes the results you get will reveal people are searching for something entirely different than you thought. For example, if you do a search for “SERP research” the first result is for an organization called The Strategic Education Research Partnership Institute.

That is…not how I’m using the term in this post. But because the rest of the results on the page have to do with SEO, that suggests that, other than the people searching for that specific organization, most of the people searching for that term are using it the way I’m talking about it.

Beyond confirming the main meaning people have in mind for a keyword, a SERP analysis can help you better understand what type of results they’re looking for. For example, let’s look at the SERPs for two related keywords: ”how to improve energy” and “supplements for energy.”

The first has three main things on it:

An answer box with information pulled from an article on the subject in a list format
A People Also Ask section with related questions
Organic results dominated by articles that list tips

All three of these point to informational search intent. Google is convinced people performing this search want articles that provide actionable tips they can put to use, in list form.

The latter search term looks different. Some of the organic results are informational articles like those on our first SERP, suggesting that’s what some people are looking for. But above that, we get shopping results.

Lower on the page, we get a local map of nearby stores that sell supplements. And several of the organic results are eCommerce brands. That all points to Google understanding this search term to have purchasing intent, at least some of the time. Some people doing this search want information, but many are ready to buy a product that meets their needs.

3. Identify any SERP features.

SERP features are all those extra features that show up on the SERP alongside the organic results. Some common examples include paid ads, the People Also Ask section, the Google local map, answer boxes, and knowledge graphs.

A Backlinko analysis found that 97.6% of searches produce results with at least one SERP feature. Understanding the SERP features for your keyword is important for a few reasons:

They help you understand search intent (as with our supplements example above).
If a featured snippet tops the page, it’s something you’ll want to target with your content
They allow you to gauge how valuable an organic result really is

To that last point, SERP features play a key role in how people will react to a SERP, and can impact how likely they are to click on organic results. For example, if you do a search for a movie, the knowledge graph that shows up on the right side of the page packs a lot of information.

You get images, the year the movie was made, its running time, where you can watch it, critics’ ratings, quotes from reviews, and a list of the top actors in the movie. In short, a decent number of the questions a person might have about the movie are answered right there on the SERP.

Even if you rank on page one for a keyword with a thorough knowledge graph like this—your content requires an extra click, and Google’s doesn’t. That might not make the keyword useless to target, but it means it shouldn’t be as high of a priority as a comparable term without a knowledge graph.

On the other hand, if the page is topped with an answer box, you’ll want to create content optimized for claiming that featured snippet. An Ahrefs study found that less than a third of featured snippets came from the top organic result. That means you don’t have to earn the top spot in Google’s organic results to be featured at the top of the page.

Pay attention to what kind of featured snippet it is. If it’s a list, structure your content in a list format. If it’s a paragraph answer box, include your keyword followed by a brief answer in the content itself, ideally near the top of the page. And of course, aim to make it better than the content currently claiming that spot.

4. Review your top competitors.

This step is the most straightforward, but also the most time consuming. In order to write content that has a chance of ranking, you want to understand what’s ranking now. Click on the top few results, and spend some time reading what’s on the page.

This accomplishes a few things at once:

It shows you what you need to beat. Unless your website has already built up a lot of authority (e.g. you’re writing for a big player like The New York Times or their equivalent in your space), your content needs to be better than the top results to have any chance of competing with them. You need to understand what you’re up against in order to create something that rivals it.
It shows you what Google considers a good answer for the keyword. The content that ranks now can teach you a lot about what Google sees as the best way to cover the topic you’re writing about. Pay attention to what different sections the ranking content includes, what questions they answer, and what language they use. And also note the length. Has Google determined this a topic that requires a longform piece to cover it adequately?
It helps you learn more about the topic. If you’re already an expert, maybe you won’t learn much you didn’t already know. But if you’re a freelance SEO writer who covers a lot of topics, this is an important step for making sure you understand the topic thoroughly before you start writing.
It gives you the chance to look for what’s missing. As you look over these pages, is there a piece of information you feel is important that none of them address? That’s your angle for creating something different and better. You have to know what’s there to find what’s missing.

This step takes time, but by the end of it you’ll not only be better prepared to create content that can rank, but you’ll find that creating your outline and doing the writing itself becomes much easier.

SERP Research Enables Better SEO Writing

If professional writers have one secret for making writing easier, it’s to hold off on trying to write until you’ve done your research. When you understand your topic thoroughly, know what you want to say, and understand how to approach it to meet your goals—the writing itself comes much more fluidly.

For SEO writing, spending time on SERP research gets you to that point. And specifically, it helps you to check off a number of goals at once. You will:

Make sure you understand search intent for your keyword.
Confirm how valuable your keyword is, and whether ranking is realistic.
Determine how to structure your content to optimize for relevant SERP features.
Understand what Google considers “good” content for the keyword.
Make sure you’re answering the top questions your competition is, and then some.
Know what you need to do to write a piece that’s better than what’s ranking now.

All of that alone won’t promise rankings. Google cares too much about things like backlinks and website authority for good SEO writing to ensure rankings alone (as nice as that would be). But it ensures you’re doing all you can to increase your chances of claiming those top spots.

August 7, 2020

Freelance Writer Rates: What’s Normal?

Every freelance writer faces the question at some point. And every person that plans to hire a freelance writer wonders the same thing.

What’s a reasonable rate to pay for freelance writing services?

One reason the question is so common is because the answer’s far from straightforward. A bit of research reveals a vast gulf between the low end of rates (jobs on Upwork or Problogger offering $25 for 500 words, for instance) and those on the high end (experienced writers charging $1 a word and up). That’s a 20x difference!

How can you get a sense of normal when the range is so extreme?

What’s a Fair Freelance Writer Rate? The Short Answer

What’s fair depends a lot on context, but just to provide a short and simple range for you to work with:

A fair freelance writer rate by the word: ranges between .20 cents for newbies, and $1 for experienced writers
A fair freelance writer rate by the hour: ranges from $30 for beginners to over $100 an hour for experienced writers.

For project rates, I can’t give you an easy range because it depends so much on the particulars of the project. But recent data compiled by Ashley Cummings can give you an idea at a glimpse.

The Reasons for the Disparity

Even after winnowing out rates so low as to not be reasonable, the range I provided is still vast. Some freelance writers are charging more than five times as much as others. How is that fair and reasonable? How do you decide which end of that range you should be on, whether hiring a writer or working as one?

Based on Ashley’s report combined with my twelve years of anecdotal experience, four main factors play a role here:

1. Experience

This is the biggest reason behind the differences in pricing between freelance writers. But it’s more complicated than more experience = higher rates. A number of different types of experience come into play here:

Business/professional experience

Many new freelancers don’t have a good grasp on what’s normal for freelance writers to charge. And those job ads with low rates I mentioned earlier cause a lot of confusion. On day one of launching a freelance business, a lot of writers vastly undercharge. And that’s especially a risk for those new to the professional world. Someone just starting their career will have a limited knowledge of professional norms in general, including around rates.

That’s where you get the super low rates, but what about the rates on the low end of the fair range? That’s from people still working to grow their skills, gain writing samples that prove their abilities, and build up awareness of their freelance business. The people charging $30 an hour or $.20 a word now will gain the experience they need to—little by little—join the ranks of the writers on the higher end of the range.

Experience in a specific type of work

Many freelance writers specialize in a specific type of work. In my case, I focus on content marketing writing, specifically blog posts and longform content marketing assets like guides and ebooks. Others build up specific experience in email marketing, website copywriting, or landing pages, to name a few examples. When someone spends years on a specific type of writing, they tend to get pretty good at it. And they gain successful examples of that specific type of work, which makes them a more attractive choice for clients needing that type of writing. All of that translates to higher rates.

Industry experience

The same thing goes for industry experience. When a writer dives deep into learning a specific industry and audience, especially one that’s complicated like B2B (business-to-business) technology or health care, they become more valuable to clients in that space. When a business hires a specialist in the field, you don’t have to worry about training them in the basics. And you’re less likely to receive content from them that reveals a misunderstanding of what your business does and who you’re talking to. That’s all worth more money.

Experience getting proven results

When you hear “experience,” you probably think first about time—the years spent doing something. That matters. But writers that charge on the high end of the range can usually also reveal evidence of results they’ve helped clients achieve. Whether that’s landing pages that drove sales, blog posts that reached the top spot on Google, or emails that get impressive open rates. Writers that can prove their work contributes to results will charge accordingly.

2. Attention to Detail

Someone getting paid a small amount per piece has an incentive to get it done fast. For $25 blog posts to add up to a living wage (at least in the U.S.), you have to crank out a lot of them. Trying to rush skilled work leads to sloppy results. It just does.

People trying to build a business off of low rates end up cutting corners. They skip proofreading, or they don’t bother with research and let errors in. Whatever they do to achieve speed leaves clients with writing that can’t stand on its own—at least not if your brand cares about maintaining a reputation for quality. Anecdotally, I’ve heard of businesses trying to save money via cheap writing that receive work they can’t use at all, or that has to be extensively re-written to become usable.

For the kind of attention to detail that produces work you don’t have to spend your valuable time editing and can use as is, choosing a writer that charges enough to give the project the time it deserves matters.

3. Type of Writing

This is part of what makes it so hard to generalize about rates. The time and skills involved in writing an entire website can’t be easily compared to what it takes to write a sales email. And since most freelance writers charge using project rates (another tidbit via Ashley’s report), that makes side-by-side comparisons of what’s normal difficult.

Project types that require a lot of time to complete, like websites and ebooks, cost more; as do projects that require specialized skill sets, like writing landing pages designed to convert.

4. Complexity of Subject

If your business is in a technical or complicated industry, then finding a writer that either already knows it well or will be able to do the research required to learn it is harder. That means the ones that do are worth more. Topics like health care, SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), medical devices, finance, and manufacturing are harder for freelance writers to learn and write about than, say, travel or video games. Businesses in specialized, complex industries should be prepared to pay writers more.

How Much Should You Pay for Freelance Writing?

You know what a fair range looks like, and presumably you already have a project in mind. But you still need to figure out where within the range you want to be.

If your budget is tight and you’re leaning toward the lower end of that range, then expect to hire someone that’s relatively new and inexperienced. That’s not a bad thing, everyone has to start somewhere. Just be prepared to spend a little more time working with them to help them learn. You may have to provide more specific instructions, do more edits, and allow them more time to research and get the work done.

If you don’t want to do that much work, but you’re still not quite sure about the high end of that range, then you’re looking for someone that does have experience, but is somewhere in the middle of their career. Maybe they’ve been working as a freelance writer for a couple of years, so they know the basics, but still have a lot to learn (although don’t we all). Or maybe they’re branching into a new type of writing they have less experience with and are willing to charge less to get their foot in the door and gain a new writing sample.

For the writers on the high end of that range you get:

Someone with a developed process into how they do their work, ensuring they get it done efficiently and meet deadlines.
Writing deliverables that need few to no edits.
An understanding of your specific industry and/or the type of writing you need done.
Someone with name recognition, whose association with your brand could give you a boost.

There are a few scenarios where top freelance writers may consider a reduced rates—but be careful how you ask. Considering ways to make the work easier on them or more valuable to their business is a much better strategy than directly requesting a discount.

Writing is hard work and worth paying a fair rate for, but what “fair” looks like in your case will depend on your particular needs. Figure out where you fall on this spectrum, and price out your budget for a freelance writer accordingly.

September 13, 2018

5 Actionable Tips from Content Marketing World Speakers to Improve Your Marketing Now

Everyone walks away from Content Marketing World inspired. Many of the talks provide fascinating insights and share good ideas. But in my opinion, the real holy grail of a good conference talk is a specific, actionable step I walk out of the room knowing I can take when I get home.

This year I was lucky to sit in on a few sessions that provided such gems. Here are a few great actionable tips that are now on my to do list and you might want to put on yours as well.

Write down your goals (and read them every day).

The first keynote talk of the conference came from Joe Pulizzi, the Founder of the Content Marketing Institute, and it covered a subject he’s written about before and clearly believes strongly about: writing down your goals.

He provided examples from his own life of how meaningful it is to set clear goals and remind yourself every day what they are so you hold yourself to them. He recommended the goals you write down be ambitious, tied to specific dates, and serve others in some way as well as yourself.

And he named five categories that he urged attendees to write goals for:

Career/wealth
Family
Spiritual
Mental
Giving

I’m still working out exactly what my goals in each category will be, but I plan to put them at the top of the to-do list document I consult each day so I have a solid reminder of where I want to be and keep working to get there.

Create (and use) your mission statement.

Does your company have a content mission statement? It should. If that sounds intimidating though, don’t worry. Andy Crestodina makes it easy with a simple template:

Our company is where [audience X] finds [content Y] for [benefit Z].

Plug in the relevant info for your company and you’ve got a line you can do a lot with. Andy recommends sharing it far and wide. Make it the tagline for your blog or even your whole website. Put it next to your email signup form. Add it to your social media profile. Tack it onto your email signature.

Your mission statement tells people why they should care about your brand’s content. It’s a good, concise way to pitch everyone that encounters your brand on why they should follow you.

Create a spreadsheet of microcontent.

Lee Odden gave a talk on influencer marketing which included this useful tip. Every interview you do with an influencer is full of quotes and insights. Why just use a quote from it once and be done? Instead, he suggested organizing all the valuable nuggets you get from your interactions with influencers over time into a spreadsheet.

In the spreadsheet, fill in each influencer’s details (name, company, position, link) so it’s easier to access those when you quote them. Categorize the different quotes based on what they’re about so you can more easily identify relevant ones to use as you create new content. And even if you don’t find the right quote for the new content you’re creating, your spreadsheet can help you quickly identify a good influencer to get in touch with to provide one.

This is useful for making your influencer marketing go further, but you can employ the same tactic for other types of microcontent as well. Add all the valuable statistics you find you may want to reference again to your spreadsheet (this is something I could definitely use). Pull in good examples of the types of tactics you write about and good social media status updates you may want to embed in future content. By having all this information well organized in one place, you can make your future content creation efforts more efficient while still always adding value.

Use details to immerse readers in your content.

Michelle Park Lazette’s talk on writing more like a journalist included a number of good suggestions to bring better storytelling to your content writing process. A few of them related to this idea that getting detailed and specific in how you describe what you’re talking about can bring it more to life for your readers.

She suggested paying attention to the sensory details of any situation you’re in – adding in a mention of smells, weather conditions, colors, or the looks on people’s faces makes the reader feel more like they’re there.

She also recommended, as often as possible, replacing adjectives with numbers. Saying a company has been doing business for a long time means less than saying they’ve been at it for 37 years. Getting specific adds believability to what you’re saying and makes it more real for the reader.

Do a validation audit of your content.

Margaret Magnarelli spoke on a topic I care a lot about in life as well as content: empathy. She shared the three phases that all empathic communication, professional and personal alike, must have:

Listen – Before you can do anything else, you have to actually hear what your friend or customer is saying. Listen to their complaints and pain points without inserting yourself into the story or trying to jump too quickly to solving the problem.
Validate – This is the step people most often leave off. After you’ve heard the person out, let them know you’ve listened and understood what they’re saying by repeating back to them what they’ve said. This shows them you were paying attention and get it. It’s an important step to them feeling like the communication is successful.
Suggest solutions – Only after the first two steps is it time to provide suggestions for ways to solve their problem.

You may already do a good job of addressing the problem and solution in your content, but there’s a good chance you’re skipping the validation step. Margaret recommends doing a validation audit of your content.

Go back through everything you’ve written to look for pieces missing the validation step and add it in. Doing this exercise will also help you get better at recognizing where and how to include validation in future content pieces moving forward.

My brain is spinning with all the ideas from the conference I need to now organize and put to use. Whether you made it to Cleveland last week or not, hopefully these actionable tips can help you create a plan to get something specific and useful out of Content Marketing World this year.

January 8, 2018

How to Write When You Don’t Have the Energy

Updated May 2022

Everyone needs the occasional sick day or mental health day. But for most of us, there’s a limit on how much time we can take off before we face career consequences. For writers, that sometimes means having to push through and do difficult, creative work on days where it’s hard.

This is a personal subject for me. For the past few years—predating COVID even—I’ve dealt with health issues that cause chronic fatigue. On top of that, I have many days where my brain is foiled by allergies (a bigger deal in Austin than the word “allergies” communicates to most people). But I run a business based around writing and I’ve had to keep it up on the bad days as well as the good.

Photo by Xavier Sotomayor on Unsplash

Over time, I’ve become used to keeping my work going when my brain and body just want to curl up in bed and avoid anything that requires mental energy. And writing takes a lot of mental energy. Yet, somehow I always meet my deadlines.

For others that struggle with similar issues—or different ones that affect your productivity in similar ways—I’m sharing what’s worked for me in the hopes that it might work for you.

It’s unlikely that every item on this list will be useful for every person reading it. But if you find that even just one thing here makes a difference, then that’s something.

1. Reshape your to-do list based on priority.

Most of us start off each day aiming to do more than we absolutely have to get done. In many contexts, that kind of ambition serves you well and helps you stay productive. But on the bad days, it starts to feel like a burden pressing down on you that makes it harder to get anything on the list done.

When you’re having an off day, an overwhelming to-do list isn’t doing you any favors. Carefully review the list and figure out which items on it can wait. You need the sparse energy you have for the writing that has to get done today. Move that to the top of the list and do it first. After the most important stuff is done, only then do whatever else you can manage. Or go ahead and give yourself the rest of the day off if you need it (and don’t feel guilty about it).

2. Analyze where your energy goes.

I’m a big proponent of focusing on energy management at least as much as time management. When you start paying close attention, you’ll realize that different types of work and activities require different levels of energy from you—and this is something that varies from person to person.

For anyone that regularly deals with low energy levels, knowing how to rework your calendar based on the amount of energy you have available is a crucial skill. But this is worthwhile even for people who don’t struggle with depression or illness. Tracking how your energy levels relate to the work you tackle each day will help you plan your weeks more efficiently. You can minimize tasks that require a disproportionate amount of energy for the value they bring to your work.

For instance, I’m extremely introverted. Adding a networking event to my day uses up a lot of the energy I have for work that day, even on a good day. I know to be strategic about when I plan to attend social events, and when to forego those plans when the energy just isn’t there.

Figure out how the typical tasks you have to deal with in a week compare in this regard so you know which ones to cut down on to conserve the energy you have.

3. Leave wiggle room in your schedule.

If you’re freelance like me, that will mean leaving money on the table, at least in the short term. But when you can’t predict what your days will be like, you have to plan your life in a way that anticipates bad days. And leaving wiggle room in your calendar means you’re much less likely to miss deadlines and disappoint clients, which adds up to more success in the long term.

This isn’t a tip that will help much if you woke up this morning feeling fatigued or depressed for the first time. But if it becomes something that happens regularly, then you have to start planning on it. Worst-case scenario, if you have nothing but good days for a while, that extra wiggle room gives you time to tackle all those tasks you tend to put off till later when you’re busy.

4. Use a social media blocker.

Seriously, it helps. Focusing on work requires energy. Scrolling Twitter doesn’t. The days I’m the most tired are the ones where I find it easiest to scroll for long periods of time without realizing it.

When your brain wants to be focusing on anything but the thing you need to be doing, that’s when social media has the most power. It’s probably not the only distraction in your life you have to grapple with, but it’s one you can do something about.

I use Focus. It costs a small fee, but it’s probably improved my productivity enough to cover its cost several times over. When you’re trying hard to focus and your brain won’t cooperate, getting a message that reminds you of your good intentions each time you try to pull up Facebook can be a helpful reminder to get back on track.

5. Create a ritual for starting work.

When the pandemic sparked a mass shift to remote work, some people were surprised to find that the commute they hated actually served a purpose they hadn’t realized: helping draw a line between their home life and work time. Psychologically, there’s value to having a ritual that delineates when it’s time to switch your brain into “work mode.”

This is a tip I got from Cal Newport’s Deep Work. To provide a tangible signal to my brain that it’s writing time, I put on headphones and pick some music or noise that helps with focus. For some people, that ritual could be taking a walk around the block, or getting your morning cup of coffee ready and settling in at your the desk. The ritual doesn’t have to be anything complicated, just something that creates enough of a routine that you can train your brain to recognize it as a signal to focus.

6. Try listening to music or white noise.

Some writers need absolute silence to focus, but for some of us the right kind of music or noise can help. Personally, I avoid anything with lyrics. But I find some instrumental music like movie and TV scores make for good background noise to write to. Sometimes when I worry even that might be too distracting, I find a white noise video on YouTube or turn to myNoise.

YouTube has tons of videos of pretty images set to music designed to help with focus (and as a side note, the comments on most of these videos are some of the nicest spaces on the web, full of people urging each other to focus—so wholesome). Just do a search for “focus noise” or focus music” and you’ll see lots of results. Give some a try and see if you’re the kind of writer who works better with the right kind of noise in the background.

7. Give exercise breaks a try.

I get it. I understand if you’re looking at the computer screen right now feeling so tired or overwhelmed or beat down by life that this is the last piece of advice you want to hear.

Taking time out of your day for exercise feels counterintuitive when you have so much to do and not enough energy to do it. But I’ve found that it sometimes kick-starts my brain and gives me a couple of hours of productivity afterward. It might not do the same for you, but it’s worth a try.

A Big Caveat: With some of the illnesses that cause chronic pain and/or fatigue, exercise can make symptoms worse. So pay attention to your own body here. Don’t keep doing something you think should be working, even if it doesn’t help in your case.

8. Watch what you eat.

I am not talking about restrictive dieting or weight loss here (not really a fan of those things!). I mean paying attention to insensitivities or ingredients that regularly make you drowsy or distracted. I know having a carb-heavy lunch brings my productivity down in the afternoon, for example. So I save the pasta dishes for dinner.

How people react to food varies, so saving carbs for dinnertime might not make a lick of difference to you. But do some experimenting with cutting certain ingredients out for a period of time to see if you notice a difference. Or start making notes of how you feel throughout the day and what you ate so you can see if there’s a relationship.

Changing your diet won’t make something like a thyroid problem or depression disappear entirely, but cutting out something that makes you feel a little bit worse will help you feel a little bit better. When you’re starting from a place of feeling crummy, that little bit of difference can help.

9. Try supplements or herbal teas.

Look, for all I know it may be the placebo affect, but I’ve found this tea helps when I’m really struggling to focus. And making tea out of fresh ginger (I add in some mint and lemon or lime) seems to help with headaches or allergy-induced brain fog. Ginseng or gingko supplements might work for some people. B-12 or vitamin D supplements may work for others. If you can afford it, ask your doctor to run some tests to see if you’re low on any supplements that are good for energy and brain health.

10. Be forgiving with yourself.

The inspirational stuff you see on social media and in productivity articles aimed at people that don’t have illnesses/depression/whatever you’re dealing with right now may be good for those other people, but they can make those of us struggling to finish the bare minimum feel rotten.

Know that it’s OK not to hold yourself to someone else’s standard when you’re having a bad day (or week, or month).

Feeling stressed out and hopeless won’t help you get things done. Do the best you can, and don’t beat yourself up if what you accomplished today is less than you’d hoped.

I’m not a doctor or medical expert, so if you’re dealing with something that you think may benefit from talking to someone who is, don’t let this post be a substitute. If you have a problem that requires medical treatment, nothing else you try will work as well. But having a few extra tricks in your bag to help out when things are hard doesn’t hurt. I hope these can help you get through the writing that has to get done today and that your tomorrow is better.

Austin Copywriter

Austin Copywriting & Content Marketing

Category Archives: Writing