Tax year end might be over for another year, but the life of an adviser, planner, or business owner is never stress-free. Geopolitical upheaval, short-term market volatility, and changing rules and legislation mean that you’ll always be fielding important questions and looking for new ways to make the right choices for your clients.
Stress can be incredibly detrimental to our health, contributing to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and depression, among other conditions.
But New Scientist reports that stress might not be all bad. Stress is our body’s natural response to perceived threats – a release of adrenaline and cortisol that pushes us into fight-or-flight mode and gives us the energy required to deal with imminent challenges.
Some people work incredibly well under stress, but for others, the feeling can be overwhelming.
If you find the monthly need to source topics and put pen to paper exhausting and stress-inducing, these four simple tips could help.
1. Struggling for ideas? Get out and exercise
There are good and bad types of stress. Sleep deprivation, for example, is a bad type. It can leave you tired, irritable, and unable to concentrate. In the longer term, it can even lead to diabetes and obesity.
Exercise, on the other hand, is a good type of stress. It releases the same stress hormones as a lack of sleep but leaves us feeling invigorated. It can improve muscle health and our emotional wellbeing.
Writer’s block can be incredibly stressful, especially if you’re under time pressure. If you’re stuck staring at a blank page, get out for a walk or a lunchtime run and return to your blog page refreshed.
2. Revert to your content plan when inspiration deserts you
Imminent deadlines are stressful, but there are ways to take the stress out of your monthly cycle of blog content. You just need to plan ahead.
When geopolitical events unfold, you’ll want to be reactive to your clients’ needs, offering a reassuring voice amid the turbulence. These types of events might seem difficult to plan for, but remember that whatever the cause of your clients’ worries, your overall message is likely to stay the same.
That means you can plan for short-term volatility before it happens and be on hand with a timely response if these events occur. This positions you as the much-needed calming voice and the go-to expert during challenging times.
Likewise, other topical events occur annually, from Easter and Halloween to awareness days like World Meditation Day (21 May) or National Allotments Week (10 – 16 August). If you have content ideas that relate to these events, you can plan that content now, getting you ahead of the game and reducing stress when the time comes.
At the Yardstick Agency, we can help you map out a content plan at the start of the year. This helps you to understand the key messages you want to get across to your clients and when, while leaving some room to be adaptable and reactive to world events.
3. Give yourself enough time to re-read and edit
Once you’ve written your content, you’ll want to get your message out. That means launching your thoughts and words into the public sphere, which could understandably make you nervous or anxious.
One way to allay these feelings is to reassure yourself that your content is accurate. After all, there’s nothing more stressful than hitting send on an article that features incorrect data or a raft of annoying typos.
Give yourself time to re-read your article and to edit. Online tools like Grammarly and Word’s read-aloud feature can help you to spot errors, and AI tools like Gemini and ChatGPT could help you to fact-check. Just remember that these systems aren’t foolproof, so trust your own judgement and always give yourself the final say.
Errors, inconsistencies, or unclear information can harm client confidence, so take the stress out of editing by factoring this into the time you set aside for writing.
4. Speak to the experts and let them write your content for you
Of course, the simplest way to avoid the stress of writing regular, engaging content for your clients and prospects is to outsource the job to the professionals.
At The Yardstick Agency, our team of expert copywriters create insightful content that can help position you as the trusted go-to source for financial content – from the latest financial news stories and legislative changes to the evergreen money questions your clients ask time and again.
Get in touch
If you want to take the stress out of your monthly blog content, we can help, so get in touch now.
Email hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk or call 0115 8965 300 to learn more.
