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Have you ever sat down to write, buzzing with ideas, only to find that hours later, you’re still staring at a blank screen? Or maybe you start strong, but then halfway through, your mind just… stops. You’re not alone. Every content writer has faced the dreaded writer’s block at some point.
You understand the importance of regular content creation — it’s the heartbeat of your digital presence and crucial for engaging your audience.
But some days, the words just don’t flow.
You’re left feeling stuck and uninspired, worried that you’re losing your creative edge. It’s not just about lacking ideas; it’s about feeling disconnected from the process itself, and that can be deeply frustrating.
I’ve been there too.
Whether it’s due to burnout, stress, or just the monotonous grind, writer’s block can make you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, getting nowhere.
But what if I told you that there’s a way through it?
That with a few strategic steps, you can not only find your way back to productivity but also ignite a spark that produces some of your best work yet?
In this article, you’ll discover a clear, actionable plan that I personally use to bounce back from creative lulls. I’ll also cover how to generate content ideas, so you never run out of content to write.
- Why Content Creators Hit Creative Walls
- The First Step to Overcoming Writer’s Block
- Secret Tool #1: ‘They Ask, You Answer’
- Secret Tool #2: The Content Matrix
- Secret Tool #3: How to Ask the Right Questions to Uncover Valuable Content Ideas.
- Secret Tool #4: Keyword Research
- Secret Tool #5: Engage Your SMEs
- Secret Tool #6: Using AI
- So, What’s Next?
Why Content Creators Hit Creative Walls
Writer’s block isn’t just a lack of ideas; it’s a complex psychological barrier that can stem from various sources, each as unique as the writers themselves. To effectively conquer it, we first need to understand its roots in the content creation process.
Here’s some common reasons content creators hit creative walls:
- Fear of Imperfection: One of the most common causes of writer’s block is the fear of not being good enough. You might worry that your content won’t be perfect or that it won’t resonate with your audience. This fear can be paralysing, preventing you from putting any words on paper
- Overwhelm: Sometimes, you’re not blocked because you lack ideas; you’re blocked because you have too many. This abundance can be overwhelming, making it difficult to focus on one topic or start a coherent narrative
- Burnout: Regular content creation can be exhausting. The continuous pressure to produce high-quality content can lead to burnout, which manifests as writer’s block. Feeling mentally and physically exhausted, you find it hard to feel inspired or motivated
- External Pressures: Deadlines, expectations from clients or managers, and the need to produce results can all contribute to stress that blocks creativity. The pressure to constantly perform can stifle the creative process rather than foster it
- Loss of Connection: Sometimes, you might feel disconnected from the topic you’re writing about or the audience you’re writing for. This lack of engagement makes it challenging to produce compelling content. Afterall, if you’re not passionate about a topic, how can you write about it? Fortunately, there is a way, and we’ll cover this later
Ask yourself which of these might be the reason you’ve hit a wall. Understanding the cause is half the battle.
The First Step to Overcoming Writer’s Block
There are some specific tools you can use to overcome writer’s block. However, before you delve into those, there’s a few things you can do which might help you solve your issue.
Here are some of those very first steps you can take, if you haven’t already:
Acknowledge the Issue
Simply acknowledging that writer’s block is a normal, albeit frustrating, part of the creative process can be liberating. Recognise that it’s temporary and solvable.
Set Realistic Expectations
Allow yourself to write poorly at first.
Remember, the first draft doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be written. You can always revise and improve.
One thing I like to do is say to myself, “I’m going to write this, but I won’t show anyone. I’ll just write it for the sake of writing.”
What I usually find is that I actually produce something pretty great, and I almost always feel comfortable passing it on for review. Sometimes we get stuck in our head, and this is a great way to move past that stuck.
Break Tasks Down
Instead of overwhelming yourself with the need to write an entire article, break it down into smaller, manageable pieces.
Tackle them one at a time. For example, you might just focus on the introduction, and forget about the rest of the article for the time being.
Switch Things Up
Change your environment, write at different times, or switch the order in which you tackle topics. Sometimes a small change in routine can spark creativity. I personally like to sit in different spots in my house when writing, and I usually do this between articles.
So, for example, for my first article I might sit on the dining table. For my second article, I might find myself on the opposite end of the same table. And then for my third article I might find myself sitting on the table on my balcony.
The point is to change your physical view and space, which ultimately results in a change in mindset, which is sometimes all you need to get started.
Reconnect
Spend time reconnecting with the purpose behind your content.
Who are you writing for and what value are you aiming to provide?
This can rekindle your enthusiasm for the topic. If you are passionate about the topic, or were once passionate about it, this is worth exploring.
Even if you aren’t passionate about it, can you find a way to become passionate about it?
For example, let’s say you need to write about toilet bowls. How could you possibly get excited for that, right?
Wrong!
Aren’t you interested to find out exactly how they’re made? What about how much they cost if you wanted to replace yours? And how about the different types of toilets that can be installed, and which ones are best? Aren’t you excited to find out about this to improve your own life and have answers to some of these questions yourself?
The point is, even if you’re writing about a boring topic, you can become connected to it by becoming enthusiastic about learning.
Use Music
We talked about changing your physical environment, but that targets mainly sight and smell. You should also think about engaging your sense of hearing.
Music can help you do this.
You’ll need to find music that doesn’t distract you, but once you do, you can use different playlists or types of music for different days or sessions. This helps you liven things up and keeps your creativity flowing
By understanding the underlying causes of writer’s block and employing these strategies, you’re probably already halfway there.
However, if none of this works for you, there’s a few tools you can use to cure your writer’s block and have a never-ending stream of content ideas.
Secret Tool #1: ‘They Ask, You Answer’
The “They Ask, You Answer” framework, developed by Marcus Sheridan, focuses on a simple but powerful premise: directly addressing the questions, concerns, and challenges your audience has.
This approach not only positions you as a trustworthy authority in your field but also ensures that the content you create is directly aligned with your audience’s interests and needs.
TAYA is fundamentally about being obsessively helpful to your audience. It requires a deep understanding of your customers and the types of questions they are asking at different stages of their buyer journey.
By focusing on these questions, you create content that is immediately relevant and deeply engaging.
By integrating the TAYA framework into your content strategy, you’re not just fighting writer’s block—you’re transforming the way you think about content creation. You’re moving from wondering what to write about to knowing exactly what your audience needs to hear from you.
And that’s the key!
Not only does this help you generate a seemingly never-ending pool of content ideas, but it also helps you get past writer’s block.
Because when you’re genuinely coming from a place of “I want to help my audience and answer their questions” it’s easy to write.
That’s because helping people is ingrained in all of us. It’s human nature. And it’s something that comes naturally.
We often overcomplicate things.
But more often than not, most things are far simpler than we’d like to realise.
And when we simplify it like this – when we remind ourselves our job is to teach and help, it really takes the guesswork out, simplifies the process, and makes it easier to just write without thinking about all the nuts and bolts.
Focus on helping your audience by embracing the TAYA framework, and you’ll get past writer’s block quickly.
How to Implement TAYA in Your Content Strategy
- Identify Your Audience’s Questions: Start by compiling a list of all the questions your customers frequently ask. These can come from direct interactions, customer service inquiries, online forums, social media platforms, and your sales team
- Categorise the Questions: Organise these questions into categories based on the buyer’s journey stages. Here’s a full guide on exactly how you can use the customer buying journey to map out your content
- Prioritise High-Value Questions: Some questions will be more critical to your audience than others. Prioritise those that come up most frequently or those that address significant pain points
- Create Content That Answers These Questions: Develop content pieces that answer each question thoroughly and focus primarily on helping your audience
Read: How to Write Blog Articles that Rank & Generate Leads
Secret Tool #2: The Content Matrix
A content matrix is a strategic tool that helps you visualise and manage your content creation process. In other words, it helps you come up with content ideas.
If you ever struggle with generating new content ideas, the Content Matrix will solve your problem. And, if one of the causes of your writer’s block is that your stuck on content ideas and creativity, this is the perfect tool to use.
What is a Content Matrix?
A Content Matrix is a visual planning blueprint of content ideas that are tightly aligned with your business’s products and services, and which focus on answering your buyer’s most pressing questions.
Rather than a random selection of topics, the Content Matrix encourages you to think strategically and focus on subjects that hold the utmost relevance for your business.
Here’s an example of what a Content Matrix looks like:
On the top row you have:
- “Your Services”, which includes each service or product your business sells. In this example, we’ve listed ‘HubSpot’ as our core service and ‘HubSpot Onboarding Fundamentals’, HubSpot Onboarding Advanced’ etc as our sub services within the category of HubSpot.
- “Cost & Pricing”, which includes blog topics related to cost and pricing of your service/product
- “Problems”, which includes blog topics related to problems surrounding your product/service or industry
- “Comparisons & Versus”, which includes blog topics comparing different solutions related to your service/product
- “Best of lists”, which includes blog topics that provide information around the best and worst options for your buyers in relation to your products, services or industry
- “Reviews”, which includes blog topics that provide reviews of your product, service, industry or materials/software related to your product/service
- “What”, which includes blog topics related to your service/product that answer “what” questions
- “Why”, which includes blog topics related to your service/product that answer “why” questions
As you can see in the example above, we have the service listed as “HubSpot” with the sub services next to that. However, if you have multiple services or products, you will simply create another row with that service and brainstorm content ideas based on each column.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to create your Content Matrix:
Step 1. Read this article
It’s important to familiarise yourself with the best five topics for content writing BEFORE you start filling out the Content Matrix sheet.
Read: The Best 5 Topics to Drive Traffic Leads & Sales
Step 2: Set up your matrix
- Start by opening Excel, Google Sheets, or your preferred spreadsheet tool
- Create a new spreadsheet
- Add columns for each of the key content categories: Cost & Pricing, Problems, Comparisons/Versus, Best of Lists, Reviews, What, and How. Leave an extra column for your services or products on the left
Your setup should look something like this:
| Products/Services | Cost & Pricing | Problems | Comparisons/Versus | Best of Lists | Reviews | What | How |
Step 3: Fill in your 1st product or service
In the first column on the left, list out one of your main products or services.
Step 4: Brainstorm content ideas
Now, for each product or service, think about the five content categories and generate as many content ideas as you can for each column.
Here are a few tips to guide your brainstorming process:
- For Cost & Pricing, consider topics that reveal the cost or pricing of your product or service
- For Problems, think about possible challenges, limitations, or issues that customers might face with your product or service
- When it comes to Comparisons/Versus, think about how your product or service stacks up against alternatives in the market. You could also compare different approaches, materials, or software, depending on your industry. For example, a building business might compare building your house with double brick vs timber frame, but an email marketing company might compare two different email marketing software
- For Best of Lists, think about blog articles that rank different aspects of your industry, product features, or even competitors. Consumers often search for “best” or “top” products or services, so these articles can attract traffic
- Lastly, for Reviews, think about writing honest reviews about your products, services, or software/materials related to your product. For example, if you sell CRM implementation, you might review the particular CRM you use. Or if you’re a building company, you might review the different materials you use to build a house
Step 5. Repeat
Repeat this process for each of your products or services. Simply list the next product/service on the left column and repeat the process. At the end, your Content Matrix should look something like this:
Creating a Content Matrix might seem like a daunting task initially, but once you start filling it in, you’ll find it’s a surprisingly effective way to generate quality content ideas that are directly tied to your products/services and your buyer’s needs.
Secret Tool #3: How to Ask the Right Questions to Uncover Valuable Content Ideas.
Brainstorming sessions are crucial for generating content ideas, but their success heavily depends on the quality of the questions asked.
Effective questioning can unlock new perspectives and drive deeper insights, which are essential when you’re stuck or looking for fresh content angles.
The right questions can propel a brainstorming session from mundane to breakthrough.
They challenge assumptions, explore new possibilities, and open up discussions that lead to actionable content ideas.
For content creators, asking incisive questions is not just about filling up a content calendar; it’s about engaging deeply with topics that matter to your audience.
Types of Questions to Ask in a Content Brainstorm:
- Audience-Centric Questions: “What are the biggest challenges our audience is currently facing?” This type of question ensures that the content is relevant and targeted
- Problem-Solving Questions: “What are common misconceptions about our industry that we can clarify?” These questions help position your content as valuable and authoritative
- Trend-Based Questions: “What emerging trends in our industry should we address?” Keeping content timely and forward-thinking can attract a broader audience
- Competitive Insight Questions: “What topics are our competitors covering well, and where do we see a gap?” This helps to identify opportunities for unique content that differentiates your brand
- Inspirational Questions: “If we could solve one problem for our readers, what would it be?” Such questions can inspire content that resonates emotionally with your audience
For a full guide on asking the right questions and holding effective content brainstorms read below.
Read: How to run an effective content brainstorm session
Ultimately, when you’re stuck on what to write about and you feel your creativity dipping, it’s probably time for a Content Brainstorming Session with your team members.
Secret Tool #4: Keyword Research
Keyword research is not just an SEO tactic; it’s a powerful tool for understanding what your audience is searching for and determining the topics that have the potential to draw in traffic.
You can use keyword tools in two ways:
- To come up with new content ideas
- To inspire creativity and think about potential questions to answer in a blog about a particular topic
One way you can achieve this is by using SEM Rush’s Magic Keyword Tool to search for phrases your audience is looking for.
Once in SEM Rush, click on ‘Magic Keyword Tool.’
Then, click on the ‘Questions’ tab. This will change all of the keyword searches and filter them by the questions that users are asking related to this keyword.
This gives you a grasp of what questions your buyers have. Use the volume column and KD% column to determine which are worth answering first. Generally, you’ll aim for topics that have a higher volume and a lower KD% (which indicates a lower difficulty for ranking).
You can also use other tools for keyword research, like Google’s Keyword Planner.
Secret Tool #5: Engage Your SMEs
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) can be invaluable resources in the content creation process. By tapping into their deep knowledge and experience, you can enhance the credibility of your content, uncover niche topics, and answer complex questions with authority. This not only adds depth to your content but also positions your brand as a trusted leader in your industry.
Whenever I’ve struggled with an article, I’ve always booked a meeting with an SME, asked them questions related to the topic I needed to write about, and took notes based on our meeting.
Hot tip: Make sure you record the meeting with your SME so that you can go back to it. SMEs generally speak with passion and enthusiasm about the topic because it’s their area of expertise. And sometimes, all you need is a little energy and passion from another human to get started. By recording the interview, you’re able to come back to it and grab onto that energy when you need it.
This is by far, one of the best ways to overcome writer’s block, hands down.
Does your team not have time for a meeting?
Ask them to send a 1-minute voice note answering a specific question you had or discussing the topic and their opinion on it.
While there may be a bad and a good process for engaging SMEs, the key here is to overcome your writer’s block, and you can achieve that by simply hearing someone else talk about it.
My team is too busy
So, your team is too busy, or maybe you don’t have a team.
It’s not the end of the world. Find someone on YouTube who talks about the topic. I guarantee that after 10 minutes of listening to this on a walk, you’ll be pumped to start writing.
Secret Tool #6: Using AI
When writer’s block strikes, staring at a blank page can be daunting.
This is where artificial intelligence (AI) can step in as a transformative tool, not just for generating ideas, but for drafting content that can serve as an initial framework for your articles.
Some of the benefits of AI-Driven drafts include:
- Efficiency: AI can swiftly draft text, allowing you to quickly move past the blank page and into the editing phase, where you can refine and personalise the content
- Inspiration: Sometimes, all it takes is a few paragraphs to get your own creative juices flowing. AI-generated drafts can offer new angles and perspectives, sparking ideas that you can develop further
- Consistency: AI can help maintain a consistent tone and style, especially useful for larger content teams aiming to standardise their output
How to Use ChatGPT as a Drafting Tool
To use ChatGPT as a drafting tool, you’ll want to write a prompt.
Your prompt should be super simple. It should state your issue of having writer’s block and should ask ChatGPT to produce either an outline with ideas for you to get started, or a draft blog.
Here’s two examples of two different prompts I used:
Prompt 1
Prompt 2
And here are the two outputs:
From Prompt 1
From Prompt 2
I personally like the first prompt better because having a draft article makes it far easier to get your creative juices flowing than a bunch of dot points, but that’s just me.
Point is, depending on the prompt you use, GPT will give you a different output. So, test your prompt and play around with it until you get something that gets your creative juices flowing.
While AI can provide a fantastic starting point and streamline the research process, the final content should always be guided by human creativity and insight. Use AI-generated ideas and drafts as a foundation, then infuse them with personal experiences, emotional depth, and expert insights to create truly compelling and human-centric content.
For a full guide on ChatGPT Prompting for blog articles, check out the below articles.
Read:
So, What’s Next?
Overcoming writer’s block is a challenge that every content creator faces at some point in their career. However, with the right tools and strategies, it’s a hurdle that can be easily overcome.
Remember, the key to beating writer’s block is not just waiting for inspiration to strike but actively creating conditions that foster creativity and productivity. Each of the steps outlined in this article provides a systematic approach to idea generation and writing that not only helps overcome writer’s block but also enhances the overall quality and relevance of your content.
Once you’ve got your creative juices flowing, you’re going to want to make sure you write content that ranks. Check out the below article to learn how.
Read: How to Write Blog Articles that Rank & Generate Leads
