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If this is you, wave your pen in the air like you just don’t care 🖊 🎶 🤌
We’ll ignore the fact that that pen looks like a miniature squid— let’s see if this sounds like you!
You write content on the internet 💻.
Newsletters, email marketing, articles, blog posts, LinkedIn, tweets, books, pitches, and sometimes tiny little eulogies for your youth. 🪦 🤷You’re fun and smart and have a sense of humor in real life (you swear!) but sometimes your content feels so generic, even you’ve heard it 1,000 times.
Everything you write ends up sounding a liiiiiitle bit like Mr. Rogers ate a soccer mom. (Okay, fine, a whole team of soccer moms.) You read your stuff back to yourself and basically just want to walk into the ocean. 🦈Worse, you end up sounding way more salesy & “bro marketing” than you intend.
Everything feels forced, you worry you sound too pushy, it’s all a bit generic, trite, and cliché sounding, and the whole entire process is exhausting and time-consuming…you’re starting to dread “content creation.”😵💫And honestly? Most of the time you feel like you’re spitting into the wind. 👻
You’re working so darn hard but sometimes it feels like nobody seems to care / notice / open your Magna Carta masterpieces. Is it your subject lines? Your writing voice? That one time you said the F-word? (And then heard from 50 people who were offended…)Or, lovely option five:
You’re actually a stellar creative marketer—or, at least decent!—and you’re just here to make your craft 10,000% sicker. RESPECT.
Ever think any of these filthy thoughts
while writing / procrastinating /
contemplating binge nachos?
“I just wanted to tell you I have loved every one of these lessons. No one teaches this like you do! Thank you SO much, I’m so glad I signed up for this!” —Meaty, Hairy Writer and Creative Student Hilde Kloppbakken, who runs a cool business in Norway called “One Amazing Business”
Ugh, that sounds stupid. What am I, a prepubescent crotch molecule?
Who is this formal, stiff, characterless corporate robot???
GENERIC CITYYYYYY.
Everybody else seems more clever, creative, cool, and funny than me
Is anybody even reading this? Hello?
I SOUND LIKE AN INSURANCE SALESMAN FROM 1984
“Comment below if you agree!” Yeah, real original, Jan! 🙄
No one’s running to push “buy” or shove coins down my shirt, despite me finally putting myself out there in the wind like Rose on the Titanic (it’s not easy holding this pose)
Oh good: another email sent with soggy open rates.
What’s too much? What’s not enough? How do I ride the line between professional & personality?
I don’t even know what “my voice” is. (That fabled, elusive parable of the gods.)
“Just following up!” I wrote yet again, unsure what else to say.
We’re all selling the same thing—how much different can I be?
Writing has become a giant, fleshy, armpit of a chore…except I have to get back on the horse because my career / online business / newsletter / book / future as Joan Didion are all hinging on my ability to not sound like a cold dud of a kernel at the bottom of a popcorn bag.