Writing to deadlines in business

Having to produce words about their business - fast- is a challenge for many business owners. So what are the 3 keys to being able to do it?

1. Being prepared. Assume that someone, somewhere, sometime will ask you for a few words about your business. Work out ahead of time 3 keypoints you want people to know. Make sure they are clear in your mind so that you can reproduce them in print, on line or face to face.
2. Having a system. Part of your preparation should be to create a system which you can use to expand on your keypoints to 100, 200 or 300 words. If you know about Twitter then you know you only have 140 characters for your message. That forces you to be concise. Moving up from that you can then build a Twitter message into a blog entry maybe up to 300 words. From there you can expand it into a fuller article at will.
3. Be flexible. Having set ideas about the way you construct text will limit the number of ways you can use it. If someone asks you for text but they want it in a specific way because of the format it needs to fit into, then help them by being flexible.

Once you've mastered those three approaches, you'll never be stuck again and you'll be ready to take advantage of many opportunities.