I spoke at this past week’s Commpose meeting about using a chaotic form of brainstorming—something I refer to as “verbal sketching”—to help craft strong and persuasive self-promotional copy.

Coming from a design background, I know that designers always say that they are their own worst clients. It seems to me that the case is probably the same for writers.

Why is writing about yourself so hard to do?

Well, to start off, you know every little facet of yourself or your business and it gets REALLY hard to narrow down what you want to say and what type of ‘voice’ you should say it in. Second, as a writer, you KNOW all of the different directions you could take—it can be really hard to narrow down which is best. Finally, writing for yourself is a challenge because we so rarely have the time to write when we are truly feeling passionate about our business—we’re too busy working on paying the bills. Then, once we manage the schedule the time to do our own self-promotional work you know you probably aren’t going to be filled with that fire that you were a month ago when you were swamped with work.

Over the years I have crafted a system that helps me to write passionately about my business on command. Everyone who knows me knows I’m rediculously organized, almost to the point of OCD, and my “verbal sketching” system is the complete opposite of that. However, the beauty of it is that it frees me up to be completely creative without boundaries of organizational structure, timelines or topics.

So just how does this “verbal sketching” work?

Write down every copy idea that could be something. And I mean everything. Even if you think you know what you want to say, if you just let your ideas flow out of your, you never know what kind of greatness can result.

Collect and file all of your snippets of ideas away. I tend to collect ideas and brainstorm for months before I make use of these ideas. This can be in a shoebox, file folder, etc.—whatever works for you. I know some people might even choose to do this digitally—however, I prefer the raw creativity of paper. For me, the physical act of writing on paper lets me be free and creative and come up with awesome bits of new ideas. When I write digitally, I always feel I need to “finish” my writing, rather than just leave it as a collection of ideas. However, for those who are ok with incomplete digital docs could find digital ways to use this process. You could create a private “diary” blog like Posterous and send random thoughts to it via your cell, or some people at Commpose mentioned using digital notes on their computer or iPhone. Heck, even a big ole’ Google doc could work great for you digital types.

SIDE NOTE: I always keep notepads handy. I have them on my nightstand, my desk (both at home and at work), in the car, in my purse, etc. Our brains are usually the most creative when they are relaxed—I can’t even begin to tell you how much of the copy on my website was conceived as I was trying to fall asleep or sitting at a redlight.

Now, you are probably asking yourself how this all comes together.

Once I feel I have compiled a significant amount of ideas and notes I find a good chunk of time to go through them and start making heads or tails of them. At this time, I compile everything into a Word document. Always include everything—you don’t need to worry about it all making sense yet.

Once I have all of the ideas compiled digitally, I go back through all of the ideas and start grouping like items together. At this point I probably should mention that I usually have a good idea of what kinds of copy I need to create (i.e. home page copy, bio copy, etc.). If you don’t know what kind of copy you need, you probably should consider these items before you start compiling your notes and ideas together.

Once I have all of my ideas grouped with other similar ideas, I start stringing these thoughts together to form some cohesive copy. Of course, you will need to add some filler copy in addition to your ideas, but these ideas are likely to hold a lot of passion in them and you will probably only need to add come additional copy to link them together. As you are writing your copy, don’t feel you must include everything at this point. It is natural that you will have ideas that don’t fit with the rest of your ideas, or times you were writing with an unfitting voice.

Now that you are done…

Ha! Lets just say I am never done. I have an ever-evolving set of idea files and am always storing copy ideas for the future. You and your business will continue to grow, so you have to be aware of this and be planning for improving your marketing copy.