When to write content - LinkedIn Tutorial

- When I used to write for magazines, I would do four stories a year and get a ton of attention for those stories. That is no longer the case. It is much harder to get heard today. On LinkedIn alone, we have over 130,000 posts a week, so cutting through the clutter, getting your voice heard over someone else's voice, is really difficult. And the way you do it is by writing great content and writing often. Now, writing is not easy. I don't think anyone is going to tell you that this is an easy process. I wrote for 15 years as a professional journalist and every single article I wrote was tough. But you have to do it. And you start building up the muscle. And one of the things that you could do is think about the topics that you want to write about. Keep a running list of things that you have a feeling are going to hit. What I do is any time I'm talking to someone and they say, that's interesting, in my mind, a little light bulb goes off and I say, that's probably a post topic. So I keep a running list of potential articles to write. You can do the same thing. You can find your own tricks for keeping track of the topics that jump out at you during the day, that you find yourself talking about all the time and getting head nods from people. Keep a list of what you're going to do. And then get in the habit of writing. Try to write every other week is what we recommend. If you can write every other week, you start showing up in people's feeds and they start understanding what they're going to get with your voice. Not only that, they start expecting and enjoying getting your voice. They want to hear what you have to say and they start turning to you as a thought leader. So get in the habit of doing it every other week. If you can, look through the comments, find other things that you want to write about that you can just answer so that you're writing now every week. It's very easy to start developing a pattern where you're just responding to things, you're hearing stuff going on and you're writing pieces all the time that are getting attention. One other thing to think about with writing a lot is, again, going back to the way the world used to work is I would put together these pieces that were beautifully fully formed, a great beginning, an incredible middle, and awesome anecdotes and a kicker that tied it all together. That's no longer necessary. All you're trying to do here is start a conversation. So don't feel like your piece has to be perfect, that it has to have all the answers. You're trying to start something that gets other people talking. So one of the things you can do is remove that barrier that says I'm not ready to write. You're always ready to write, and you can let the crowd finish your thought. Don't wait for the perfect topic, for the perfect piece, because there is no perfect piece anymore. You have to write a lot, and sometimes it's going to work and sometimes it's not going to work. So what you think is perfect might not be perfect. Just get it out there, keep writing, keep trying, keep putting it out. People are incredibly willing to go with you on your journey as you discover what it is that you want to talk about. They will give you ideas about what else to write, about what they want to hear. So just start writing, get it out there, overcome the fear of the blank page.