Last email I promised tips on how to more easily come up with valuable content that will get you the “long attention” that leads to winning clients.

I'll repeat the tip from the end of the last email: make a public commitment.

It's amazing how I can procrastinate forever on something, but when I tell people I'm going to run a webinar on a certain date or send them an article by a certain time, it gets done.

And that includes creative work.

Start with a big idea.

This is the 9th email I've written about getting and keeping the attention of your audience.

Invest some time thinking about what you do with clients and the big ideas behind it.

When I thought about my Authority Breakthough program, for example, I realised that it came down to teaching people how to focus on the right clients, come up with a distinctive point of view that would set them apart, and then use that to get and maintain the attention of their audience.

I then took that idea of getting and maintaining attention as the centrepiece of this series of emails. It's a meaty enough topic that I already had a variety of tips and models. And I was able to do further research to validate those concepts and extend them.

All of us have a handful of big ideas we use in our work with clients – we just might not recognise them as such.

A few minutes thought about what those big ideas are that underlie our work can lead to inspiration for dozens of pieces of valuable content.

Find a medium you're fluent in.

In theory you should use the medium that works best for your clients.

But the reality is that there are plenty of your ideal clients who prefer to read, plenty who prefer to listen and plenty who prefer to watch video.

You can use the medium you find the quickest and easiest.

I'm a writer. Some people find it much easier to switch on the camera and record. Others to dictate. Do what works for you (and you can always rework it into another format later if needed).

Riff off events around you.

Rather than turning internally for inspiration or waiting for the muse to strike, turn things that happen to you into content.

It could be your experiences in business (stories of my catastrophic mistakes always seem to be popular for some reason).

It could be your observations based on general life (great service you received at a restaurant for example) with a lesson for your clients drawn from it or just implied.

It could be based on something you saw on TV or read.

Keep a notebook with you (or use your phone to take notes) – if you're anything like me you'll find something deeply interesting or amusing one minute but then forget it the next if you don't write it down.

You can turn those experiences into micro stories. Little short vignettes you introduce an idea or tip with.

We all know the power of stories, but I think these micro stories work best in our field. For me, long, drawn out dramatic stories in business emails leave me shouting “get to the point”. 

Harness your emotions.

If something makes you angry in your field, write about it. If something inspires you or makes you happy, write about it.

Turn them into a lesson of course. There's almost always a lesson in there.

Write about now.

Document what you're learning and experiencing right now in your business and life.

(By the way – did you get an irresistible urge to follow “write about now” with “the funk soul brother”? I did :) )

I think there's a tendency to assume that our audiences are only interested in hearing from us about things we're deep, deep experts in. Things we have decades of experience about.

That's true sometimes – but it's actually a rarity in my experience.

Like a whole wave of people in lockdown I got interested in bread making – something I hadn't done for 30 years or more.

I started off reading books from big-name artisan bakers like Chad Robertson and Ken Forkish.

But the people I ended up paying the most attention to were the amateur bakers with youtube channels and blogs who made bread for fun (and to eat) just like me.

People like Sune Trudslev, Maurizio Leo and Hendrik Kleinwächter who bake in their spare time but who have got good at it.

They're just a few steps ahead of me so they're more relatable. I feel that if they can make something so can I.

The same is true of your content. As long as you're a few steps ahead and have useful information to share, people will value it.

No need to pretend you have all the answers. Be open about what you're doing, what works, and what doesn't.

Block out time in your diary – and disconnect.

This is perhaps my most important tip.

If you want to create content consistently you need to set aside time to do it. And you need to wean yourself off checking email or social media every few minutes.

This is such a tough one for me.

I've convinced myself over the years that I need to check email and my Facebook groups regularly because my business is online and I need to be responsive.

But I've found in the last few months that I've been much more productive at creating content by blocking off an hour or so every morning and just writing without checking email or social media.

And, of course, no one really expects an answer instantly when they email me.

I've not been perfect. Some days I'll just manage 10 minutes. Others I'll go a couple of hours.

But overall I've been much more focused.

Whenever you switch from creating to reacting your brain has to switch modes. And it takes a while for it to get back into creative mode (an absolute age in my case it seems).

If you do an hour's creative work but check email every 15 minutes, you probably only have your creative brain engaged for 15-20 minutes of that hour at best. Keep away from email and your brain is engaged for over double that time.

It's an ongoing battle for me right now, but one I'm hopefully winning.

(That's an example of the “write about now” tip, of course. And yet again I'm thinking “…the funk soul brother”. Curse you Fatboy Slim).

I hope this list of shortcuts has been helpful. If you're looking for more I have a neat little Linkedin article with 21 sources of inspiration for blog posts and emails here.