Fake it till ya make it | It’s all about practice

portrait of Stewart Hillhouse
Stewart Hillhouse

Tips on enhancing your professional writing skills

  • It’s way different than educational writing and academic writing. If you’re used to writing essays for school, you probably don’t have a great relationship with writing. It’s a very powerful professional and personal tool that not a lot of people have and can set you apart if you do have it.
  • Don’t wait to write a massive blog post and expect it to go viral. Write about the smallest thing possible in detail, rather than it being an overflowing ocean of ideas. Write about things and as much nuance and detailed as possible. If you keep writing like that, you’ll start seeing the connections between your ideas, and your writing voice takes form.
  • Take note of whatever content you’re consuming whether it be a book, a podcast, or even conversations that you have with your community. Whenever you can physically feel that there was a good point made,  jot it down in the notes of your phone. Understand that, writing is teaching yourself a second time before you teach someone else.

Tips for content marketers to find inspiration for different topics

  1. Create content like you’re an investigative journalist. Rather than trying to be a thought leader right off the bat. When we think of creating content, people think about being a thought leader and having these very dramatic viewpoints. Reporters are the best example of people who make worthwhile content.
  2. Look to reporters. They’re always writing articles and doing reports. They have an endless amount of topics that they can cover because their job is to find the most interesting person who knows about a topic.
  3. Put yourself out there from day one, and get your head chopped off with every single post you do. It might lead to the algorithm wanting to show your stuff, but is that really the kind of game you want to be playing.

Advice on networking and navigating LinkedIn

  1. The fastest way to network is by making content. Follow a bunch of people who post every day, and whose content you like the style of too. Someone can be creating content but if the style doesn’t match what you want to be eventually, then don’t even bother with that person.
  2. Pay attention to people who do high-quality stuff consistently. Have people on your feed that you can get inspired by. Posting on LinkedIn is just a great way to practice effective communication.
  3. Follow the A-I-D-A framework. It stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Open with something that will grab someone’s attention. This could be something that leads to a punch line. Build interest that will keep them reading. The best kind of short-form, every sentence should make the person want to read the next sentence.  Desire, talk about what the person who’s reading it desires.