“I want to blog but I don’t know what to write about.” THEN READ THIS

This might be one of the top questions I get all the time so this blog post is gonna be easy peasy – I promise. Pinky Swear! It’s literally these three things:

Do you follow the news?

No matter if you’ve been around since Walter Cronkite days or your news source is Trevor Noah, you have probably listened to or read some form of the news. You likely have seen new stories recently such as:

• USA Today (Feb 15, 2019):  More Americans than ever are struggling to pay their car loans as overall debt rises in US
• NerdWallet (Feb 14, 2019): Should You Refinance Federal Student Loans?
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Feb 15, 2019):  3 in 10 Americans have more credit card debt than emergency savings, a new survey says

People – there is a very real and scary thread in these articles. Money – people have more and more trouble budgeting it, managing it, etc. and although these folks might not be your target audience for services – writing articles around how to fix this puts you in a good light as a thought leader in your community and eventually these folks might find their way to your door to manage assets.

Do you know to fix problems brought up in the news?

The next question you have to ask yourself is, “Do I know how to fix this problem?” Overwhelmingly we have a lot of really good planning and commonsense smarts on these topics in financial services. Write about it! (And when I say ‘write about it’ OMG – write in terms people understand because our jargon is clunky and unfair to the average reader. You might be really familiar with profit loss statements and net vs. gross – the average person? Not so much.)

Do you have access to what is needed to fix the problems brought up in the news?

If you have the means to fix the problems through a product or planning service in your organization – invite people to a workshop or free consultation to chat. One thing I’ve learned over the years is debt to income is individual and subjective. What I consider “poor and destitute” is probably not the same as someone who has another $250,000 in the bank. It’s all relative.

BE A PERSON OF ACTION: What to do – what to do? Take what’s in your brain and get it out. You can only do it one of two ways: by writing or speaking. So create a few videos, but for best search engine optimization, write them out and here’s the trick, just change the titles into questions. Using the first example above about car loan debt. Write an article titled, “I am having trouble paying my car loan debt, what are the best steps to fix this?” or “How do I payoff my car loan debt?” or “Should I refinance my house to pay off my car loan debt?”