It is a murky, wet bank holiday weekend in August.  Your clients are all away on holiday.  Things have quietened down.  You are feeling the need to drum up new enquiries and new business.  And true to form, it is precisely at this time that inspiration for writing your next business blog or newsletter is in short supply.

So, what do you do?  Apart from hiring a professional copywriter (ahem!), it is probably a good time to reassess your business writing to date.  Take a look at back issues of your newsletters or direct mail campaigns.  What worked well?  What generated the most interest or enquiries?  Next, take a look at what is happening in the blogosphere.  What are people writing about in your industry or space?  Rather than write about the same thing, try asking yourself “So what?” or “What next?”.   Pushing yourself to think beyond everyone else will help you to create new ideas to share with customers and clients.

Take a wander around Twitter and other social networking sites and allow yourself to mooch about a bit, virtually speaking.  Indulge yourself in updates or blogs that interest you, click on links to see where they take you.  Have a notepad and pen ready to write down any ideas as and when they occur to you.

And finally, relax.  Sometimes, the demands we make of ourselves to be witty and clever stop us from writing anything at all. So start off gently with an idea. Write what you need in order to articulate the idea or message you want to convey and then head off for a coffee.  When you return to your article, blog post or company newsletter,  you will find it a lot easier to edit and add in that humour, pace or insight that seemed so elusive when you started writing.

Happy writing!