Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• What To Write
• When to Write
• Considering Audience
• Writing Headlines
• Timely Writing
• Attribute Your Sources
• Handling Feedback
• Sharing Your Work
• Analytics

Introduction

• In the world today, everyone is expected to be the entrepreneurs of their own careers.
  • That might mean being an actual entrepreneur. It might mean talking about who you are and finding your own path within a large company or a small company.
• One of the best ways that you can do this, is through writing.
  • Putting your thoughts down in a way that shows how you think and what you know.
• There’s nothing more powerful than building a conversation around your content. You should always be shooting for conversation.

What To Write

• We all fall into a pattern of believing that things that we know about, everyone knows about.
  • That there’s nothing that you’re uniquely qualified to talk about.
  • That is 100% not true, you have unique insights, you have understanding, you have lessons that you’ve learned from your unique career that are worth sharing with the world.
• You’ve got to feel comfortable with the idea that it’s worth getting those out on paper.
• How do you know what to write about?
  • What are the kind of things, when you meet with someone for the first time and you’re talking to them about what you do, what are the stories, the anecdotes that you share that hook people?
  • Things that make them want to stay with you rather than looking over your shoulder to go connect with someone else in the room?
• What is it that you are struggling with today?
  • Contemplate the things that you struggle with day to day at work, that you’ve struggled with in the past, that you hear colleagues struggling with, when you talk about overcoming adversity or, and no matter how big the adversity is, it could be very small trials and tribulations, it could be really large, difficult, hairy problems.
• Whatever it is, when you talk about problems, when you talk about overcoming certain things, people like hearing that.
  • Audiences like to know that there are solutions or they like hearing how you think.
  • Think through the kind of issues that you’re dealing with every day.
• What are you working on right now? What’s going on that you’re really struggling with? Those are topics for posts.
  • Or why did you quit your last job? Someone gives you an example of why they quit, that’s a topic.
• Think about the topics that you discuss every day, that you talk to your husband or wife about, that you talk about at parties.
• Make a list of all the things that you might want to write about and I guarantee you you’re going to come up with three or four sure-fire winners that you can start with.

When to Write

• It is much harder to get heard today. On LinkedIn alone, there are over 130,000 posts a week.
• 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.
• Writing is not easy. I don’t think anyone is going to tell you that this is an easy process. But you have to do it.
  • 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.
• 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’s recommended.
  • 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.
• Get in the habit of doing it every other week.
  • 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.
• All you’re trying to do 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Just start writing, get it out there, overcome the fear of the blank page.

Considering Audience

• You have know your audience. You have to know what the readers want.
  • Is this something that someone is going to want to spend their time with?
• Knowing your audience means knowing sometimes you want to reach a huge crowd of people.
  • Sometimes you want to reach, sometimes you’re opening a store at Mall of America and you want to get this massive foot traffic.
• But sometimes it’s a niche.
  • Eg. If you’re a writer about, who just wants to talk to the medical community or if you are doing something that is just important for automotives or people in product management. You have a much smaller audience you’re trying to reach.
• Regardless, always think about: Is this something that they’re going to want to read?
  • Is this something they’re going to spend part of their day focusing on and are they going to want to contribute their own voices to it?
• One great way to think about who your audience is and whether they’re going to engage with your posts is find out what they’re already reading and talking about.
  • You’re better off joining a conversation in progress, of being a voice that helps shed a light on something people are already struggling with or talking about or engaged with than trying to start something entirely new and bring the world over to what you want to discuss.
  • Be part of their world rather than trying to make them part of your world.
• Regarding length, posts should always be as long as the content dictates.
  • LinkedIn data tells us that if you write from 800 to 2000 words, you’re in the sweet spot of getting engagement on your post, but more important than that, of thinking about those as general rules is, am I writing to the length that my content deserves?
  • Sometimes you want to write really long. Sometimes you want to write short.
  • As long as you’re writing about something engaging that people want to discuss, that they want to be part of, they’re going to stick with you the whole way.
• No matter how short our attention spans get, people will stick with you for the length of the piece if you have something really intriguing to say.
  • Or, they’ll skim it and they’ll find places where they want to join the conversation or pieces they want to take out of it.
• Long-form writing really encourages skimability.
  • People are going to quickly, they’re standing in line somewhere, they’re flipping on their phone, and they’ll find the paragraph that really talks to them.

Writing Headlines

• Headline is what brings people into your post. What is it that you’re going to say that makes them think: “This is worth spending the next 10 minutes of my time with.”
  • When it comes to headline, there are a number of tools that you can use to make sure that you’re writing a great one.
• Number one is clear beats clever. Don’t use puns. Don’t try to come up with something that you think is very clever wordplay.
  • People don’t have the time to try to puzzle through it.
  • You need to make them understand what the utility is of clicking on whatever it is that you’re writing.
• Number two is be conversational.
  • This isn’t homework that you’re doing. You’re not presenting a position paper.
  • You’re not delivering the State of the Union Address. You’re giving some insight into how you think or where the world is going.
  • You want it to be something that people feel like it’s going to be fun for them to engage with.
• Number three is you want it to be something that’s shareable.
  • People are going to share your content. They’re going to share it on LinkedIn.
  • They’re going to share it on Twitter. They’re going to put it up on Facebook.
  • If you have a conversational title, it’s going to make them feel good about sharing it.
• A good method for finding good headline is to craft six or seven headlines.
  • Do a quick brainstorm an dsend it to a group of people that you regularly ping about your posts and just say to them: “Which of these headlines would you click on without knowing who the author is?”
  • It’s important to take yourself out of it.
  • You’re asking someone to say, if you’re in the middle of your busy day, which one of these things is intriguing enough for you to actually click through? A
• Make it clear that this is your point of view, that you’re giving something unique back to readers and that they’re going to read something they could only read from you because you’re putting yourself into the headline.
• You’ve seen listicles online. You know that lists work so you want to try it yourself.
  • The problem with lists, and we’ve seen the data, is that they get very low engagement.
  • They are totally forgettable. There is no way to separate your list from anyone else’s list.
  • Try to avoid the listicle as much as possible.
• A better version is to put yourself into it. You might say something like: “The [X] I had [Y], and didn’t [Z].” Again, you’re making this personal.
  • You’re making it conversational. It’s the kind of sentence that you might actually say to a friend.
  • It’s going to encourage sharing. It’s really built for a social world.
• It’s a mistake to use colons in headlines.
  • Writers think it makes them sound serious, like they’re delivering a very important topic.
  • But the colon makes you sound boring. It makes it sound like it’s a paper you’ve written for college, avoid the colon.
• You want to shoot for something that feels entertaining, that people are going to want to share, that they’re going to want to spend their time dealing with.
• Pay incredibly close attention to your headline.
  • No matter how great your post is, how well you’ve written, how smart you sound in your post, if people can’t find it, they’re not going to talk about it.
• Don’t be afraid to try out new headlines.
  • When you write a piece, if the headline’s not working, swap it out, put another one in.
  • Change it four or five times in an hour until you find something that you’re happy with and that the readers are really happy with.

Timely Writing

• Look at what pieces are doing well on LinkedIn, what the platform needs more of, and the way you look at this is by looking at what’s in the news.
  • Check the headlines to see what people are already talking about, and we ask people to write posts based on what the world is discussing.
  • There are so many topics that you can weigh in on that allow you to put your voice into the conversation that’s already happening.
• There is something unique that you can share in this conversation.
  • Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you have nothing to add.
  • You always have something to add, so think about where you can fit in, how you can lend some personal story or some anecdote, some way of understanding or adding new insight into what’s happening in the world.
• Writing off the headline works. One of my favorite examples is “The New York Times” had a story about the pressure cooker environment inside Amazon.
  • It was a front-page story. 24 hours after that story came out, a engineer at Amazon wrote a post on LinkedIn about his experience at Amazon, what it was like to work there through his eyes, the good and the bad.
  • The post blew up. It became one of the most read posts that week on LinkedIn.
  • It got over a million views. This is someone who’d been writing for awhile on LinkedIn, doing okay, but it wasn’t until this post ‘til he rode off of the news and talked about things people were already talking about that suddenly the trajectory of his writing on LinkedIn completely changed.
  • It changed so much in fact that people started writing about his post. He became the news. So, you do this right, and you become one of the headlines.

Attribute Your Sources

• Forgetting attribution happens all the time by people who are well-seasoned to writing or totally new to it.
  • It’s very important to make sure that you have the rights to use the images you’re using, and more broadly, that you’re giving attribution throughout your work.
• When you use an image or an infographic, someone has created those and they have the rights to them.
  • Try finding images that you can use by doing a couple things. On search engines like Flickr and Google, they’ll have a way to search just for creative commons images.
  • Images where the original creator said, “It’s okay for you to use them.” You can use those with attribution.
• When it comes to attribution, it’s a bigger question of how do you make sure that you are giving credit to people who have come before you?
  • When you use a quote from someone, when you are riffing off an idea that someone else has had, it’s incredibly important to give credit, to make sure that you are acknowledging that they’ve discussed this before, that you’re building off a conversation.
  • If you use a big paragraph, make sure you’re linking back to the original work, make sure you’re saying who said it.
• Everyone understands that our ideas aren’t original, they are built off of things that you’ve learned or heard over time.
  • Make sure you’re giving credit to other people.
• There’s an added benefit to doing that, which is that when you add to someone else’s conversation, they’re more likely to come back and talk to you again.
  • They can help amplify your work if you say, “Hey, I just quoted you in my story,” or, “I loved the post that you wrote last week, “and I mentioned here and I add my own thoughts.”
• Those are the kind of things that will generate a conversation which mean that you’re ideas go much more broad than you could have imagined.

Handling Feedback

• When it comes to positive comments, you might get 100 comments made to your post that are all saying the same thing, Great job, this is really good, I really liked your story, etc.
  • You don’t have to respond to all of those. Pick two or three comments that you want to respond to where you can add some other value to it.
  • If someone says something where they share their own voice, if helping carry on the conversation, those are the ones you want to respond to, someone gives their own personal point of view that builds off of what you said.
• When it comes to negative comments, it’s a little bit trickier.
  • All of us are primed to get upset. You spent so long writing the post, and you put yourself into it before someone just comes on and they criticize you.
  • Number one, don’t respond right away. Take a deep breath, take 24 hours, don’t feel like you have to respond at all, and don’t feel like you have to respond to every one.
• If someone leaves a critique of your post that is warranted, you should respond.
  • If they point out a typo or a mistake you made, respond and say: great point, I’m going to change the post.
  • And then change the post and thank them for their feedback and point out at the bottom of my post that it was changed because of commenter.
• If someone’s just making a critique that I disagree with, but is a reason and thought-through point, respond also.
  • Just thank them for pointing it out.
• You should be magnanimous in accepting critiques. You want to make people feel like that you’re open to hearing what they have to say because, again, the goal here is starting a conversation.
  • Sometimes a conversation is really welcome, and sometimes it’s difficult.
  • Either one means that people are engaging with your work. That’s important.
• Comments are also a great source of new topics to write about.
  • Go through your comments and see what people are engaging with, what they’re reacting to, what they’re building on.
  • You can almost always find something in those comments that are an idea sparked for a new post.
• If you write something that generates a tremendous amount of feedback, take that feedback, find four or five themes that people are bringing up and create a new post out of that.
  • It’s a new way to come up with a topic for you to write about and you carry on the conversation.
• It’s really important to accept that we are in a social world that people want to have their voice heard, that you’re giving them the icebreaker to talk about their own experiences. The more you can embrace comments and help turn them into a conversation, the better off you’re going to be.

Sharing Your Work

• After writing, you need to build an audience for your work.
  • One of the top ways you do that is by sharing your content.
  • You’ve got to be out there sharing everything that you’re writing.
• For instance, send it out on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Facebook.
  • That’s to start, then you want to do things like talk about the people you’re discussing in the story.
  • Add the name of the person you’re talking about, or other people that I think might be interested in this story.
  • It’s going to show up in their feeds, it’s going to show up in emails to them, etc.
  • They’re going to want to respond by sharing it with their own networks. They might have something they want to add.
• They might write their own posts off of it.
  • Again, what you’re trying to do here is start a conversation.
  • You can’t start a conversation in the vacuum. You have to have people around you who are willing to engage with your content.

Analytics

• When you’re writing, you’re writing based off what you know.
  • You’re using your heart and your head and your gut to be able to get it all out onto the screen.
• When you’re done, that’s when you turn to the analytics.
  • The data can really help you understand who you’re reaching, whether you got to the right people and when the right times are for your next post.
  • You can use the data to be a better writer.
• There are a couple different tools that I would encourage you to rely on:
  • On LinkedIn, there’s a page where you can get information for every single post about what industries you reach and what geographies your readers are in and what level of seniority they’re at.
  • A lot of writers use this to make sure they’re reaching the audiences they were hoping to reach.
• For instance, a CEO of a major healthcare company who only wants to reach doctors.
  • When he writes a post that does incredibly well, the first thing he does is look at his analytics and say, “did I reach people in the healthcare industry?”
  • A post can be a giant post forum, but if you reach the wrong audience, it was a failure.
• Data can help you understand whether you’re reaching the right audience.
  • Before you start writing, you’re always thinking about the audience you want to reach.
  • The data tells you, “did I get to these people?” the data also helps you understand when the right time is for you to write, who your readers are, who are the people who are constantly sharing your work and talking about it because you want to engage with those people.
• They’re the ones who are going to start the conversation based on what you were saying.
  • You can use all kinds of data tools to help you schedule your post to be able to think about social media sharing.
  • The data really gives you the ability to build this audience. So use it wisely.

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