Quick Tips Tuesday: 5 common mistakes founders make when writing their own content and how to fix them
It’s 11:00 on a Wednesday night. You’re sitting in a dark room, staring at a blank document. You’re watching as the cursor just…blinks. Like it’s daring you to write something. But despite the merciless taunting, you just can’t seem to magic the words into the right order. It’s the dreaded ‘blinking cursor,’ or ‘blank page’ syndrome that all writers know so very, very well. But you’re not a writer. You’re a startup founder, CEO, CTO, and acting COO who really needs to get this blog post written and posted so you can reference it in a shareholder meeting first thing in the morning. Did you just Google “how to sound smart but not pretentious” again? You did, didn’t you? The struggle may be real, but it doesn’t have to hurt this much. Truth is, most founders who try to wear too many hats often end up with one that has a “writer” label tucked under the band like a modern-day “Press” badge. Writing for a dedicated audience requires a skill set. Is it one you possess? I would hazard a guess and say no. Nestled there amongst your dozen or so deeply impressive skill sets is not a bag containing the tools you need to effectively reach your audience with the facts and figures you want them to know. So what’s a founder/CEO/CTO/COO/apparent Head of Content to do? The good news is that these struggles follow predictable patterns, which means they have predictable solutions. Read on to see if any of these five common mistakes startups make when writing their own content sound familiar. Then see if you can implement the solution given and get ready for a revolution in your content production. 1. Lack of focus: Ensure your content has a clear purpose The problem: I’m starting with the biggest, and sadly most common, error I see when a founder tries to create a content program from scratch—an utter lack of focus. The blog page reads like a monkey coming down off a three-day sugar bender wrote it, each piece bearing little to no resemblance to any other post…or even tangentially to the company’s industry or vertical. Shotgunning content onto various platforms may get your name out there, but not for the right reasons. You’ll become know for your scattershot way of doing things, which will be interpreted as how you do business overall and kill potential leads. Without a clear goal for each piece, your audience will abandon the noise on your channel for one with more signal provided by one of your competitors. The Solution: Before sitting down in front of that cursor, define what success looks like for each piece you intend to write. Is the goal to drive conversions? Nurture existing prospects? Show some love to your existing clients? Establish your industry chops? Each and every sentence you write going forward should be aiming your content directly at that goal. Get all this recorded somewhere. I recommend fields in your editorial calendar where you track target audience, calls-to-action, etc… In other words, if you’re aiming for conversions, don’t write about industry news. If your target is brand awareness, don’t get bogged down in your latest production numbers. And if you want your customers to know how much you love them, for pity’s sake don’t write about how much your new product will disrupt all existing models…including your old one. 2. Overcomplicated language: Remember the KISS rule – Keep It Simple…Silly The Problem: There’s a line between sounding smart and being helpful. Some founders walk that line successfully, making it clear with their writing that not only do they know their stuff, they’re humble enough to understand that not everybody will be at the same level of expertise with their topic. Others…well I’m sure you’ve read those pieces, the ones where you find yourself re-reading a paragraph multiple times trying to parse one particularly problematic sentence. The “look how clever I am” approach backfires because most readers just want to read about a solution to the pressing problem they’re having. They don’t want a masterclass in industry jargon and techbro aphorisms. When you spend too much screen real estate conveying how mightly your vocabulary is, you risk those big words piling up into a wall between your expertise and the people who came to you for solutions. The Solution: Write like you’re explaining it to your uncle over coffee. Or niece. Or someone else in your life who isn’t technical and doesn’t really care what you do all day. This approach will lead to cutting the jargon, shortening the sentences, and creating easily digestible chunks of information rather than the gristly mess you had initially. By prioritizing clarity over cleverness, you’re cutting down on the complexity without lessening the impact your words can have on your audience. Plain language doesn’t have to be simple language, I’m not asking you to dumb down your writing—rather I’m asking you to use all the cleverness you can muster to explain a complex issue clearly and concisely. This is a task many find much harder than spewing a thesaurus-worth of tech-speak and jargon. Bonus points if you send a draft to that uncle/niece/whoever for feedback before hitting publish. 3. Winging it: Tracking metrics can help improve content, too The Problem: Content is not like spaghetti—throwing it at the wall won’t help you determine what will stick with your readers. It’s also not much like Costco, in that producing content in bulk won’t help if you don’t know what’s sticking. Without some amount of metrics tracking, you can publish as consistently as anyone, pumping out lengthy educational blogs and engaging topic explainers and still end up with zero conversions and lackluster click-through rates. The key to this mistake is that people don’t always associate words, which they view as subjective, with metrics, which they see as more objective. And they’re not wrong. Where these folks are erring is in assuming you can’t track subjectivity. The Solution: You have to select