Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

1Everybody Writes

I want to tell you that the key to taking your writing muscles from puny to brawny is to write every day. That writing is a habit, not an art. It is the former—and I'll talk about that in a minute. But before I do, let's reframe this business of writing.

As you think of developing a writing habit, realize that you probably already do write every day. You write emails; you post to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram; you comment on blogs. Recognize all that posting for what it is: writing. And reframe it as a legit aspect of your daily workout—in the same way always taking the stairs becomes, over time, part of a fitness regimen.

I hope you'll consider this first rule a kind of call to arms to improve all of your communications, rather than just the stuff we traditionally think of as “content.” Embrace the idea (as I said in the Introduction) that your words are your Web currency: they are a proxy, a stand-in for the important things you want to convey to your customers, and the world.

I want your readers and followers and audience to enjoy your words more, and I want you to maybe even feel a little proud of them.

But getting to that point requires—in all of us—a crucial shift: viewing the words we use as an important piece of who we (and our companies) are online. First, though, we have to overcome what holds us back from being writers: a combination of fear, lethargy, and a lack of confidence or knowledge (or both).

“If you want to be a writer you must do two ...