Do you write enough?

I’ve had several people compliment me recently about my longer form writing and I thought, what the heck, let’s talk about THAT for a bit…

(And yes, there’s a tie in to contests down below so don’t lose hope LOL).

It really is fascinating because I have never considered myself a writer… yet after running and curating a blog for the last 10 years, I seem to have become one.

And it also fascinates me that 95% of the time, it is stream of consciousness writing.

I come up with a topic and often I think of the title first, and then just start writing.

Most times, when I finish, I do a quick read-thru and make any tiny edits and I hit publish.

But it isn’t as if I’ve become a writer from scratch and can do it right out of the gate… I mean I’m 61 years old. I’ve been writing for a while!

Some of it comes actually from the fact that I’m very comfortable in front of the keyboard – which is all due to my mother. She taught TYPING after all in high school for many years.

And so typing comes very naturally. I can type quickly, almost as fast as I think.

In fact, sometimes I get really frustrated with people in Facebook messenger because they type so slowly I want to read what they’re going to say and they’re taking forever! LOL

On another side note, I become good friends with my accountability buddy Candace partly because she types quickly like I do and the conversations happen quickly.

And why don’t we teach typing any more in school? I know there are some keyboarding classes (at least in our school district) but when I watch young people type with 2-4 fingers and some of them can do it quickly, I’m just amazed at how slowly most of them work… and with only using a couple of fingers, they HAVE TO WATCH their fingers and so they’re constantly raising their head up and down.

So horribly inefficient!

Looking at the keyboard does nothing but slow me, and everyone else, down.

Another big side note… it drives me crazy that programmers don’t allow for many keyboard shortcuts in their programs either. How is it that people move their hand to that mouse to move from field to field on a FORM online when they could just hit tab?

Anyway, I am finding that I am liking the writing and the telling of stories so I’m going to try to do much more of it.

I think the thing that slows most people down tho is they don’t really think of writing as telling a story.

People love stories!

I’m going to write more (and I’ve spent part of the morning thinking about how to collect these stories and what tools to use to write more easily (I’m using Scrivener right now – heck, why not collect these into a book I could publish?)) and I hope that these stories will serve you and help in some way.

So what about that tie-in with contests?

Wilco, of upViral fame, did a post about how his testing showed that long form squeeze pages actually converted really well and offered up a sample PDF to show what he meant… so let’s not just make contest lead pages all about short and sweet y’all.

The key for me is that when you make time to create a longer page that has a lot of information and things that build trust (social proof for example), then you’ll get more signups.

And yes, that means you have to write more.

If you’re in business, you should make time to write… after all, what you’re doing is building a better relationship with your biggest fans.

But I hear you screaming “but I don’t have time! My day is already full!” Trust me, I know.

That’s why I’m implementing processes to write and engage more with YOU.

More tomorrow…

Shoot for the moon!
planetMitch