I wrote the other day that it can be an uphill struggle to write when you have an enormous task ahead of you. Whether you’re writing a book, a niche website or something else entirely, you always have to start at the beginning.
I struggle with this, as does Walt, who commented on this post the other day. I imagine a lot of writers struggle with this as well. So today I thought about ways that you could make the process a little easier.
I have written about gamification before. Essentially, that’s what we’re doing. We’re creating a game to account for the cumulative effect of writing. All we need is some post-it notes.
Before We Start
I like to break down my sales letters into easy-to-use templates. I have a few that I’ll choose from depending on the subject and type of product I’m selling. All of these templates require certain facts about a product though. I decided for the niche site challenge, I’ll write them on post-it notes.
Here’s a structure I use for my post-it notes:
Product Name / Project
Interest Point / Lead-In
Company information
Two types of people that’ll like the product
Benefits 1-5
Scenario for an embedded story
Where you can get it
P.S. Section
Depending on where you get your post-it notes, this might be a lot of information to fit on a side-or-two of paper. You could always use a note book or something. You don’t need to have all of this information either, it’s just what I’m doing.
Here’s an example I’m making up off the top of my head:
Cat Collar (Niche Site #200)
Does your cat escape from his collar? Here’s an impenetrable restraint.
Super Cat Collars are the industry experts and their Cat Collar is the best on the market.
If you’re a parent who has children to keep your eyes on, or you’re a young professional that leaves Whiskers the cat alone all day, then you need this collar because…
Its great
You can’t escape it
Its bright pink
It has a built-in microchip that connects to your iphone
It’ll make your cat love you more
Imagine you get home and you see a dead cat on the road. Immediately your mind jumps to the worst. You can’t bear to look at the poor thing. Instead, you load up your phone – and a blinking light tells you that your cat is actually bothering a pigeon. Mystery solved!
Get it at Amazon and never worry again.
P.S. You might like this cage too so your cat can’t go anywhere anyway.
Playing The Post-It Note Game
You have your post-it note with the breakdown of your sales letter. It has everything you need so that it’s a useful piece of paper in its own right: I can write these post-it notes in a couple of minutes and even take them out with me wherever I go so if I have a spare five minutes I can write them.
Also, you have an easily accessible list of benefits should you ever want to write about a similar product or a product for a similar market, and you don’t have to wade through your sales letters to find what you’re looking for.
But let’s play a game.
I’ve written before that every word you write is an asset. Every sales letter you write is certainly an asset, and if it’s a good sales letter, it’ll make you money like a rental property.
When I was younger I used to love playing Monopoly. (I still love it, but nobody plays against me anymore. ) The idea that you hop around picking up properties and they bring you income spoke to me as a kid… and that’s why it’s an apt metaphor for writing sales letters.
Think of each sales letter as a monopoly property. You write the sales letter, you put houses on it (when you send traffic to it or build a site around it) and whatever other analogies you can think of.
The beauty of thinking about this is that when you have little post-it notes, you can actually do this in real life:
If I create twenty-eight niche sites in a year, and each of those has ten sales letters on it, then I’ll have two-hundred and eighty post-it notes that are a visual representation of the work I’ve put in. In the image above, there are about twenty. So you can see how the visualisation becomes powerful over time.
Every time you write a sales letter, add a post-it note. Every single day you finish an article, you can add one to your growing pile.
Modifying The Game
You could easily change the game for your own devices. Walt was talking about how tough keyword research is. You could have one colour for research complete, one for writing complete.
If you’re writing books, then you could have a post-it note for every book, or every chapter you write.
If you are writing articles for your blog, then they can be a post-it note each. If I’d have done that, I’d have clocked over 130 post-it notes on this site alone. It just goes to show that writing a little every day adds up.
You don’t have to use post-it notes at all! You could just have a visual representation that you can add to so that you can see the cumulative effect of all the words you write.
Final Thoughts
This is a bit of a gimmick, but I can almost guarantee it’ll work. The problem with the internet and computers is that you can do a ton of work and yet you can’t really see anything for it. I’ve written probably close to a million words this year and because it’s all on a screen, that could be ten thousand words or ten million words. Visual representations close that gap.
P.S. You’ve probably got a better way of doing this than I’ve just come up with. If you have, let me know in the comments!