What’s the First Step to Writing a Blog? Writing!

“What’s the first step to writing a joke?” asks Kumail Nanjiani, actor on HBO’s Silicon Valley. “Realizing that writing is work,” he concludes. “You write and you write and you rewrite.” In short, he explains, you develop a work ethic.

Asked whether he emulates Stephen King (who won’t stop until he’s written 2,000 words that day), Nanjiani replies that his own rule is to write first thing in the morning, for at least ten minutes.

That’s a good model for blog content writers, I’d have to say. Far too many business owners start out strong with their blogging, but months or even weeks later, begin to fizzle. Daily blogs become weekly blogs, and pretty soon, months go by between blog posts.

In fact, my company Say It For You was founded to provide professional writing services to business clients, where the owners’ attention was constantly drawn away from content creation because they were putting out fires, making sales, and dealing with personnel issues.

Nanjiani actually has a second content creation job, in that he hosts a podcast for X-Files fans. To prepare, he goes through several steps, all of which could be valuable for business blog content writers (whether those are the business owners or professional practitioners themselves, or freelance content writers they’ve hired).

“I look up reviews to see if there are aspects I’ve missed.”
“I look up interviews with the writers.”
“I look at Google message boards to see what people were saying at the time each episode aired.”
“I look for discourse on the Internet” that happened later on.”

That’s precisely the depth of preparation that it takes to sustain a marketing blog over long periods of time. Reading, bookmarking, clipping – and even just noticing – new trends and information relating to your business field goes a long way towards keeping the blog “quiver” stocked with content ideas.

Nanjiani knows he needs to look for ongoing “discourse” – to find out what’s being said online, NOW, about his topic (in his case, the X-Files)?

Blogging for business means knowing what’s being said by competitors, what’s trending, what aspects of your field are being discussed. It’s much more than just studying analytics reports – it’s asking the questions so as to become part of the answer.

What’s the first step in writing a blog?  Blogging!