There’s a specific kind of stuck that happens when you sit down to create content for your business. I call it the blinking cursor effect.
You open the app. You scroll for “inspiration”. Twenty minutes later you either post something forgettable or you close the app and tell yourself you’ll do it tomorrow.
Because here’s what nobody tells you: the hard part of content isn’t the writing. It’s knowing what you’re trying to do before you start writing. What the purpose of the content actually is. When you skip that part, every piece of content feels like starting from scratch and that becomes exhausting and overwhelming.
You think it’s a creativity problem. Or a time issue. But it’s really a strategy issue.
So here are the five questions I keep on hand and give to every client I work with to answer before creating anything.
1. WHO are you creating this for?
Get specific. Uncomfortably specific.
“Small business owners” is not an audience. “Women entrepreneurs” is not an audience. Those are demographics, and demographics don’t read your Instagram caption—people do.
Try this instead: picture one actual human. A past client. Someone who DM’d you last week. The person you had coffee with who described their business problem so precisely you got a little fired up about it. Name them in your head if it helps.
The specificity is what makes it land. When you write for one person, a hundred people feel like you’re talking to them. When you write for a hundred people, nobody does. Remember that people are consuming your content individually, so you need to address them as individuals.
Ask yourself: If this piece of content only reached one person, who would I want it to be?
2. WHAT are they feeling or struggling with?
This is the question most people rush past, and it’s the one that does the heavy lifting.
Not what they need—what they’re feeling. Those are different things. Your client might need a content strategy. What they’re feeling is embarrassed that they’ve posted three times this year. Overwhelmed by the number of platforms. QConvinced everyone else has this figured out and they are falling behind.
Name the feeling in your content. Out loud. In plain words.
This is where so much marketing falls flat. We describe the problem in tidy business language (“inconsistent posting cadence”) when the real experience is messier (“I feel like a fraud telling clients I’m good at marketing when I’ve been ghosting my audience for months”). One of those makes someone stop scrolling.
Ask yourself: What would they say about this if they were venting to a friend, not filling out an intake form?
3. HOW does this help them right now?
Every piece of content should leave someone with a win. Not eventually. Not after they book a call, hire you, or use your product. Right now, in the sixty seconds they spent with you.
The win can take a lot of shapes:
- Relatable experience — “this happened to me too, you’re not broken”
- Advice — here’s how I’d think about that
- Tips and how-tos — here’s the actual steps
- Permission — you’re allowed to stop doing that thing you hate
- A reframe — what if this isn’t a problem, it’s a signal?
All of these count. What doesn’t count is content that only makes sense as a setup for your offer. If the entire value of the post is “hire me to find out,” you’ve written an ad, not content. Ads have their place, but they don’t build the trust that makes the ad work.
Ask yourself: What can they walk away with even if they never work with me?
4. WHERE will this live?
Format and platform are not an afterthought — they shape what you will create.
A thought that works as a 900-word blog post gets flabby as a Reel. A punchy Threads post gets thin when you stretch it into a newsletter. The same core idea can absolutely travel across platforms, but it has to be rebuilt for each one, not copy-pasted.
Answering this before you create saves you the frustration of writing something great in the wrong shape and then trying to shove it somewhere it doesn’t fit.
Ask yourself: Where does my person already spend time, and what does content look like there?
5. WHY are you creating this?
This one matters more than it looks like it does.
Every piece of content should have a job. Building awareness. Establishing authority on a specific topic. Nurturing people who already know you. Driving a specific action. Sometimes the job is simply: I have a point of view about this and I want it on the record.
Knowing the why is what keeps you going when a post underperforms — because you can evaluate it against what it was actually for instead of against a vanity number. A post meant to deepen trust with fifty people did its job even if the reach was modest.
It’s also your best defense against posting out of anxiety or under pressure. If the only honest answer to “why am I making this” is “because it’s been four days,” that’s worth noticing.
Ask yourself: What is this piece of content supposed to do for my business?
You don’t have to start at number one
This isn’t a linear process, and treating it like one will make it feel like homework.
Some of the best content starts at question two — you hear a struggle from a client and work backward. Sometimes you start at four, because you’ve committed to a weekly newsletter and the format is the constraint you’re building inside of. Sometimes you start at five, because you have something you need to say.
Start wherever the spark is. Just make sure that by the time you hit publish, you can answer all five.
The real reason this works
Content feels hard when every post is a blank slate. These five questions turn a blank slate into a fill-in-the-blank — and a fill-in-the-blank is something you can actually do on a Tuesday afternoon between client calls.
That’s the whole game. Not more discipline. Not a better hook formula. Just knowing what you’re doing before you start doing it.
Save this one. Come back to it the next time you’re staring at that blinking cursor.
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