THE BASIS POINT

Mortgage Blogging vs. Financial Advisor Blogging

 

This summer, @sethczerepak wrote a great post called 5 Tips For Bloggers From The Greatest Writers In History. The post has details on each but here’s the snapshot:

Ernest Hemingway on Beating Writer’s Block
“My work habits are simple. Long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”

Truman Capote on Editing
“I believe more in the scissors than the pen.”

Robert Frost on Writing With Passion
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

Mark Twain on Overcoming Perfectionism
“If we wrote like we talked, we could stutter.”

Charles Dickens on Giving 100%
“He did everything like he did nothing else.”

The recurring theme here is spending a lot of highly-focused time on writing and editing. Which is completely true and incredibly difficult when you’ve got a day job. And it’s quite frustrating when your blog is about your day job and you’re on the front lines of so many great stories but are too busy to write about them properly.

I didn’t have this frustration in October, where I was able to keep up with high volume client work plus posted 90 stories on TheBasisPoint.

But November and the start of December are a different story. Client priorities prevail over writing.

Last month I asked financial blog heavyweight Josh Brown how he can keep up the furious pace of blogging and media activities without his client work suffering, and his answer as an investment advisor is fine-tuning his business model to be more selective about taking on new clients. And of course he never really reveals just exactly how much time he spends writing—but if you’re familiar with Josh’s work, you have to wonder when the dude sleeps.

The mortgage industry doesn’t work the same way as managing people’s money. You can’t control client flow with asset minimums and other tactics like financial advisors can. Lending is a transaction business. You have to do most of the work that’s involved in any transaction just to determine if you can even do business with a certain new client. So if you want to run high volume (which you must given the loan officer pay cuts mandated by Dodd Frank), you have to work with hundreds of new and prospective clients per year. You can do this and still offer a great client experience if you build a team, which I’ve been fortunate to do. And writing daily plus being a good family man is even doable on top of this, but it doesn’t leave much grey area for getting sick, burned out, or even low energy for a small portion of any given day.

So when I get sick, burned out, or low energy I tend to not write at all so that I’m not putting out crap. But today, I’m frustrated about not feeling like I have enough time to do anything I want to do, so I’m writing this post.

I don’t think I’m alone so I’ll file this one under the Robert Frost theme noted above.

And for regular readers, I should also note that I’ve got some good stuff coming this month—including new installments of my mortgage technology and under radar housing recovery series. Thanks for reading. I hope you stay tuned, and hope I stay healthy 😉

Now go read this blogging tips post, it’s a good one…
___
Reference:
5 Tips For Bloggers From The Greatest Writers In History

“How Do You Have So Much Time To Blog?” (TheReformedBroker Josh Brown)


 

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