by Mandy Green, Head Coach Women’s Soccer, University of South Dakota
As College coaches, we write a lot. We write to juniors and seniors we are recruiting or have already committed, we write to parents, or we are writing to youth coaches who have players we want.
If you just sit down and try to come up with a brilliant message that will get opened, read, and returned, you may find yourself wasting a lot of time staring at a blank screen as you try to figure out what to write.
Also, if you don’t have a lot of experience writing recruiting messages or are not a very good writer, it can feel incredibly time-consuming. But more importantly, if you don’t have a strategy or workflow, I have found it takes even longer. So what I want to do today is to share what I learned from Michael Hyatt, author of “Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World.”
Michal Hyatt uses a 10 step process to write his blog posts quicker. Today I am going to share the first 3 strategies. (Go to www.mandygreencps.com for the other 7 steps). I highly encourage you to try this out when you have to send out your next batch of recruiting emails because it really does help to speed up the recruiting writing process.
1) Start writing the night before. Come up with what you want to write about and then rough out the details. The idea is to just get the process started and then let it simmer in the background of your thinking as it sits in your subconscious I’ve found that helps me so much. If I just sit down and try to write, I sometimes end up just being stumped, at a blank screen not knowing what to write about.
2) Use your downtime to think. I want you to think about when you get your best ideas. Usually our best ideas happen when we’re relaxed. That’s why a lot of good ideas come to you in the shower and other places. By starting your recruiting message the night before, in your downtime until you actually write the email, you can purposefully be thinking about the next set of messages that you could send out.
3) When it is time to actually write your recruiting messages, go offline. Put yourself in a distraction-free environment where your phone and email notifications are turned off. The thing that kills writing recruiting emails and turns a 30-minute process into a 7-hour process is when you’re allowing yourself to be bombarded by social media and other kinds of interruptions.
Now, these 3 steps may work great for you. If not, hopefully at least I have you thinking about how you could tweak this to find a formula or process that would work for you. I think the important thing is that if you can define a process for yourself, no matter what that is, and then spend the next several weeks optimizing that so you know exactly what the steps are, it’ll be much faster for you to get in the groove and be productive with writing.
My hope in giving you this process as well is that it will take a little bit of the stress out of writing recruiting letters for you, because it can be very stressful. And when we get stressed about it, we actually end up procrastinating or putting it off, and then those consistent recruiting messages we are supposed to be sending never happen.
Come up with a system. It doesn’t mean you can’t deviate from the system from time to time. I do. But at least you have a track to get you started and a way to get your recruiting messages out that works for you 90% of the time.