The title to this blog post popped up in my Twitter stream recently, and though unattributed, I believe is spot on.

This is not to say that it is not important to study and prepare and develop qualifications for whatever profession you happen to desire; quite the contrary. In order to do many things in today’s world it takes degrees, licenses, certifications and other pieces of paper to gain entry to that profession and to legally perform services. Certainly I am not suggesting for a moment that a person should be allowed to do brain surgery without the documented training, experience and testing.

But the beauty of our economy is that there are many incredible things that ordinary people can do and accomplish without permission from anyone. Consider for a moment the world of education. While it is not possible to teach students in any of the government school systems without a teaching certificate or other equivalent piece of paper (and in many cases being required to join a union), there is an amazing amount of great teaching that goes on outside the academy. And I’m not just referring to home schooling...

I was reminded of this fact recently by another Twitter entry by none other than Bill Gates.

So you've decided to start a blog or begin contributing articles to a community web site. With the absolute best of intentions, you sit down at the computer, open up your favorite text editor and BAM it hits you... writers block. You stare at that blank screen and nothing comes. You brainstorm for a few minutes and your mind is a total nothing.

Well don't despair. It happens to everyone.

Here are three techniques to banish writers block from your experience.

1. Use Headlines for Inspiration

For this blog post, I went out to the CopyBlogger site and just grabbed three random headlines for illustration of this technique. There are literally hundreds of ideas to choose from. Consider these three-

SEO Copywriting: 5 Essential Elements to Focus On  - using this headline we can generalize it to the construct

: {number} Essential Elements to {verb}   So using this formula it is easy to imagine using this in your area of specialty - .

Selling Your Business? 6 Essential Elements to Focus On   
Buying a New Phone: 4 Key Technologies to Be Aware Of  
Credit Cards: Seven Things that Can Cost You Dearly
Website Design: The 8 Things Every CEO Needs to Know

Writing a great blog post is really an art form. There are hundreds of different styles, a myriad of reasons for writing and an infinite number of topics from which to choose. Your blog in most cases will have an established theme or a defined niche, so each blog post should build on others in your niche and above all serve to educate and inspire your audience and build your reputation.

Let's take a quick look at ten dimensions of a great blog post that can serve as both a planning tool as well as a checklist for before you hit the "Submit" button.

1. Write Great Headlines -  There are lots of techniques and "formulas" available to help you write your headlines. Take some time to peruse those on the net and begin to develop a file of potential headlines for your blog. Some authors suggest writing your headline first because everything flows from it, while others suggest writing it last after you've finished your post. Either, and both, work; do whatever is most comfortable and gets the best result. The bottom line for the headline is to get the attention of the reader, and get them into the post enough to read the first line. You can be cute, funny, straightforward, provocative or mysterious, it doesn't matter, as long as it works. Writing good headlines is an entire blog post in itself - actually it could be an entire book!

2. Educate - Don't Promote -  Everyone knows the purpose of a blog post is to promote - yourself, your product, your company, your cause or your passion. But no one likes to be spammed! Paradoxically, your blog post will do the best job of promoting if it promotes the least. Use your post to educate your readers. Provide value in the form of sharing your expertise and insights, and you will be far more effective than if you are overtly promotional.

Great advice, and the title of a well crafted blog post by Jason Baptiste. 

Jason’s main premise is that everyone builds on what has been developed in the past as the basis for new things.

The world is filled with things that seemingly spring from nowhere, but come on the scene exactly as a number of key enablers begin taking hold. Think of Twitter as just one example. Just a few short years ago, Twitter would have been impossible. Underpining this amazing application are a number of tools, concepts and infrastructure. Computers certainly, but perhaps more important, smart phones. Cloud technologies and massively scalable internet infrastructure also play a role. The understanding of social media by the general public plays into the capabilities understanding. There are other factors at play, but what is clear is that Twitter could not have happened without key technologies and concepts.

I’m sure you can recognize other technologies that are having a tremendous impact on our lives – iPhone, iPad and iPod from Apple are huge game changers. Android from Google is having a major impact (as of this writing Google was activating 200,000 Android devices a day – not all smart phones) Open source with its significant foundation and infrastructure players Linux, Apache, MySQL and PhP to just highlight the major players of the so-called LAMP stack. And countless open source applications that make so much of what we do possible – WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, SugarCRM, Asterisk, Android and the list goes on almost forever (over 39,000 open source projects on SourceForge alone).

Several years ago when I was still the owner of the largest IT training company in San Diego, I used to say, “My next company is not going to have any employees”. You might think that I had a bunch of horrible people working for me – not hardly, they were for the most part some of the absolute best! Rather it was just the hassle and liability factor. I felt like every decision I made had to be made in the context of minimizing legal and regulatory liability. I could hardly run my business.

Everything about employees carries the overlay of legal liability – race discrimination, age discrimination, ADA, sex discrimination, sexual harassment, and so on. Then there are the taxes, the reporting, the benefits, the rules and regulations.  There is the specter of hiring an employee and then not being able to get rid of them. I often felt that each time I hired an employee, I was betting my entire company.  In California, everything is stacked against the employer and favors the employee.

The obvious solution it to not hire employees, but rather independent contractors, right? Whoa, not so fast – the government is dead set against independent contractors and the assumption is that an independent contractor is really just an employee, and in fact it becomes the obligation of the employer to prove that the independent contractor is not an employee – guilty until proven innocent. Not a great solution at all – in fact, in most cases just a way to expose yourself to even more liability

Profit & Loss Recasting
Or
A Layman's Guide to Determining Your Company's Value.
 
Small business owners are accustomed to thinking about revenue and expenses in terms of minimizing taxable income for the sole purpose of limiting their tax liability. While that may be a good strategy for tax time, it is definitely not a fair representation of the financial performance of any given business. Therefore, trying to determine the value of a business without recasting (adding back owner's personal use of business funds) the Profit and Loss statements is almost guaranteed to give the buyer a misinformed valuation; too low or too high. Understating the cash flow from operations, overstating the legitimate business expenses and or not showing the cash sales is guaranteed to result in an offering price well below the business's true worth. This always results in antagonistic negotiations between owners and buyers. Never a healthy situation. 

 
The words speak for themselves - "My business is in trouble! What the *&^# do I do now?!?!?!"
 
While I've chosen to eliminate the expletives, we all know what they would be.
 
Unfortunately or fortunately as the case may be, I've been here so I can speak from my own personal experience - it's not a pretty place to spend any amount of time. You find it difficult if not impossible to concentrate, your mind uncontrollably wonders from one problem to another, from one emergency to another, from one impossible decision to another without making a decision, without clarity of thought, without moving forward with a plan or a goal or a solution. Panic! Indecision! Misdirection take over! Or worse... No direction at all. Merely and continuation of actions made from fear, shortsightedness and the inability to see past the immediate crisis - the one right in front of us - right now.