We Women Writers
Inspiring and encouraging women to write, to develop a personal writing practice through exploring the real-life writing stories of other women
We Women Writers
Deborah Owen - From Librarian to Content Strategist
In this episode of the We Women Writers Podcast, host Jane Jones speaks with Deborah Owen about her journey as a writer and the evolution of her career into content and copywriting. Deborah shares her experiences in teaching, coaching, and the importance of consistency in writing. They discuss the challenges women face in writing, the significance of maintaining a digital footprint, and the empowerment that comes from sharing personal stories. The conversation emphasizes the transformative power of writing and encourages listeners to embrace their voices.
Takeaways
- Women often face reluctance in writing, but addressing negative thought patterns can lead to breakthroughs.
- Creating a digital footprint is essential for modern writers to establish their presence.
- Interviews can be a valuable method for capturing personal stories and experiences.
Quote:
"You can make a change."
Resources:
Inside Out Ministries: https://insideoutministries.info/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DeborahCOwenCopywriter/
Jane Jones (00:00)
Hi there, I'm Jane, and this podcast is designed for you. Five minutes of daily writing can change your world. Come with me as we explore the stories of women who transformed their lives through writing. Welcome to the We Women Writers Podcast.
Today we have with us Deborah Owen, and she'll be speaking about her writing story and the journey to her program, Winning Content Strategy.
Deborah Owens’ life has been centered around relationship building and the use of quality information. She has a master's degree in library information, and she is a published author, a blogger. She holds a number of coach certifications and now writes, speaks, and teaches about the power of content marketing. So welcome Deborah.
Deborah Owen (01:03)
Jane, it's great to be here, Jane. Thank you for inviting me.
Jane Jones (01:07)
Perfect. So, would you please tell us about your writing story, your journey?
Deborah Owen (01:11)
So, to start with, okay, great. Jump right in, I'd be happy to do that. So, I guess my writing started many years ago. I'm sure a lot of our viewers and listeners probably were writers when they were children. Maybe they wrote in a journal or something like that. I did that for a little while, but not that long to be perfectly honest. I think I really, I enjoyed writing in high school. I took some upper-level classes in history and English, and really learned a lot about research and how to then take what I was doing for my research and be able to articulate it in writing. And that made the transition to being an English major in college, actually, I was a double major in English and music. That's all about communication, right?
I had some fabulous English professors at Mount Holyoke College, really, really terrific. And they helped hone my kind of more professional writing style, which I continued to use as life went on. My first master's was in choral conducting. I did that for a while. We raised our children. And then when our youngest was about four, I decided it time to go back to school and figure out what am I going to do with myself? I've been raising kids for a number of years. It's time to contribute to the family income. So, I went and got my master's degree in library and information science from Simmons and again did a lot with research. We did a lot of writing, and that led into 12 years of being a school librarian. I'm trying to smush it all so it doesn't take too much time here. no. So I was a school library teacher, and I basically taught teenagers how to do research.
And reluctant teenagers I might add. And while I was doing that, I got to a point where I was reading so much because I'm kind of this inveterate learner. And, I was constantly reading and trying to make myself a better teacher. And I felt like I needed to share what I was learning somehow. So, I started a blog originally for other school library teachers. And then I kind of expanded it to teachers in general. Of course, nobody knew that it existed because I didn't know how to market it. I just wrote and put stuff on the internet and hoped they would come. Of course, no one did, but that's whole other story. But it was a wonderful writing discipline for myself. I was committed to putting out a new blog post every Monday and Thursday. And I did that for really long time. I ended up with well over 100 blog articles just on that initial website.
So I guess I must have done it for about a year. It was about a year. I wrote twice a week consistently. And I think that's the key thing that people need to realize is you need to write consistently. You need to write every day. the other piece of this too was during this time I started to take some classes. And one of the things I did was I took Jeff Goins' class called Tribe Writer. And that was my first introduction to the fact that all that stuff I had learned in college did not apply at all to writing for the web. And I had to find a voice, and I had to shorten my sentences. I had to, you there was just so much I had to do to write for the web that was completely different from writing for the papers that I had to write in college. And also when I was a librarian, I wrote for a couple of peer-reviewed journals. So I got some of those articles published. And again, that's a very different style of writing for the web. So you have to be able to transition to who your audience is and practice writing for that audience. And that's really the key. Again, I'll kind of jump ahead a little bit. I did leave teaching about two and a half years ago in order to start my own business as a parent coach.
I still didn't know what I was doing. I took a bunch of online courses. took Jeff Walker's course. I took more Derek Halpern's course. took, I mean, there's just a lot of stuff that I did to try to educate myself. And long story short, I had trouble getting traction as a parent coach, so I took a job writing for an internet marketer named Todd Brown, who's kind of a big name guy. And lo and behold, all of sudden doors started to open for me as a writer. And I finally, after a year, stopped trying to market two businesses, you know, the writing business and the coaching business. And I, because I didn't have the bandwidth to market two businesses anymore and I just threw myself into the writing. so I have been doing a lot of copy, content writing, which is more informational in nature. And I also wrote for Scott Oldford last summer, which was my first opportunity to do copywriting, which is really more persuasive writing, sales writing, marketing writing. And so I again started studying with a mentor in order to learn how to do real copywriting. And so now I do both. I have the content marketing background, and I have the copywriting background. And I write for both now. I have clients that ask me to do both.
Jane Jones (06:30)
Okay, so then, so that's how you found yourself in the winning content strategy business.
Deborah Owen (06:38)
I launched that a little over a year ago when I realized I needed to have a business name in order to kind put myself out there as a writer. I guess you don't have to. You don't have to. You can do writing if you want to. But it seemed like the right thing to do for me at the time, and I had a coach who was working with me, so that was what I did. So I launched winningcontentstrategy.com and it's kind going through an evolution which is totally fine. I think the biggest thing about it as a marketer is you find out where's the need in the market. What do people need? And then you figure out how to solve that problem for them, and then you sell them the solution. And so if you go into a business thinking that you know what the need is and then you discover, it's not really that, it's this, you have to be open to the fact that you are going down a path that's not going to work for you and it's okay to pivot and go down a different path if you can solve the problem for those people and you enjoy doing it.
Jane Jones (07:33)
Perfect. Something you mentioned that I am wondering is a thread relative to how effective you are with your business currently is when you're teaching teenagers how to use the internet, and you phrase them reluctant teenagers. A lot of times women who are writers are kind of a little reluctant writers. There's lots of reasons for that. Being consistent, you said talked about being consistent and being doing it daily. You talked about being focused. That often doesn't happen for lots of reasons. And we get really creative about our excuses. Yeah, yeah. And so the idea that you're used to dealing with teenagers. How does that help you in your business now?
Deborah Owen (08:17)
Oh, that's a great question. How does dealing with, and I still continue to work with teenagers, actually. I'm one of the advisors for the youth group at our church, too, because I didn't want to completely give that up. And I guess the fact that I still get to see those kids, I love those kids at our church, they're awesome kids. And they make me laugh, and they keep me grounded in what's going on in the world. I think that's really important. You know, what's the latest lingo for younger people? And you do kind of need to know that. Even if your target market is 40 and 50-year-old women or men or whatever it might be, you still need to be grounded in what is current in pop culture. And kids really help me with that, for sure.
Jane Jones (09:16)
Perfect. So, then you're interacting with the teenagers and helping them learn from them, and then helping them along through their angst, their life changes, and things. There's a lot of listeners out there who don't really know about writing. They just feel that they want to and they aren't quite sure how much they want to do it. Then there's women in business who are currently writers who want to get better. So there's this huge, there's really quite a varied level of writers out there listening to us today. So when you do, when you run your programs, we'll talk about the programs that you run in a minute, your own personal experience in writing, and then your experience in teaching the teenagers. Is there anything in particular that you bring as a result of that to your interacting with your clients?
Deborah Owen (09:55)
Absolutely. I have, as you indicated in my early describing my biography, I have a number of coaching certifications. I have strategic intervention coach, which is the Tony Robbins model. I also have parent coaching, and life coaching and mental toughness, which is really geared toward youth performance. There's, so I've got all of these different coaching models kind of running around in my head as I'm talking with my clients. And it's absolutely informed the way I ask questions and the way I dig into what's really going on for them, what they think they want versus what they actually want, what's on the surface versus what's down a little bit deeper. All that coaching background has informed the way I interact with my clients and with my clients.
Jane Jones (11:06)
Okay, perfect. A couple of other things about you relative to your own writing that women out there may find resonates in them is when you’ve got to write, you talked about being focused and consistent and daily. Is there something that you personally find really helpful to maintain that consistency, that focus?
Deborah Owen (11:29)
I'm actually not as good at it as I would like to be, and as I pretend to be perhaps, maybe even to myself. Ideally, you have a routine that you really stick to. And anybody who is a guru in productivity will tell you this exact same thing. You have a morning routine and part of it involves taking care of yourself, exercise, meditation. I also do a little bit of Bible reading and making sure I spend that time for myself. I try to do that before I dive into my work. Sometimes I wake up and my brain is just running and I run to my computer because I can't wait to put down what I'm thinking about. I don't want to forget it. Really, you have a routine. So once you've taken care of yourself and you feel really good, and then you sit down and you have time blocked off to do some writing. And I actually do this as much as I possibly can.
I do occasionally have morning meetings, especially because I actually have clients all over the world. talked to a guy the other day in Romania. There's six hours ahead. And so I need to talk to him in my morning in order to talk to him in his afternoon. I have a little mastermind group of people that I met on events almost a year ago. And all three of them are in the UK. Sometimes, because of the way things are, I schedule things in the morning. Most of the time I try to schedule my meetings whenever possible in the afternoon so that my mornings can be focused first on taking care of myself and then also on when I'm clear, most clear thinking, and can do my best writing and creative processing.
Jane Jones (13:07)
Right. One of the things I appreciate all of the tips about being consistent, consistent about having a routine and organizing stuff. The very first thing you started with though, I would like to say that it really is like that's it is being honest. Yes. Being honest where you are that if like you said if you wake up in the morning and it's to the computer it's like oh sorry I got a schedule I have to keep or somebody wants you to do something in a morning and it really isn't terribly necessary it's not required so you just simply say no I'm going to do this instead so it's something that is fluid that you're in charge of, but it starts with you being really honest.
Deborah Owen (13:52)
Yeah, that's true. What do you need in order to be most successful for yourself? Try really hard to work around that. Sometimes it's not possible. I mean, we're women, right? We're moms. I don't have any small children at home right now, but I have had that, and I still drop everything.
Jane Jones (14:08)
Yes. Well, and there's women as well, because I'm a mom and I'm a Nanna And so I do have a lot of friends who do not have children. And they still, those, that demographic of women also has the same, something else is coming that is really keenly important. They're going to have family, they're going to have friends, they're going to have things that they will drop everything for as well. So the context that we each have our lives framed around is really helpful as long as, or to the extent that we're in charge. And we're going to, and sometimes your time is not your own, that is true, our time is not our own. However, we actually are in charge of that as well.
Deborah Owen (14:56)
You make choices. For instance, yesterday our daughter is 23. We've got three children. She's the middle child. She's 23. She's moving from Boston out to Salt Lake City on Sunday. And so she really needed to get a new car that would handle the weather better out there. And so all of sudden she called me and said, I need to go pick up my car. Can you come help me? And, you know, I had a window of time. I was planning to work. But I dropped everything for my daughter.
Jane Jones (15:25)
Absolutely, and that's incredibly valuable. as women, do find it easy to make those, we do transition through those choices relatively easy when they are our core priority. Okay, so as it relates to your clients, are there women that, are there things that women have surprised you that they've done something that has been really wonderful that you think “Wow, kudos to you. There you go. Go, girl”. What kinds of things have you seen that have surprised you and, seen them excel in?
Deborah Owen (15:59)
Great question. I think the biggest thing that I have seen is actually related to what you said a few moments ago about honesty. And that is when women are at a point where they deal with their own emotions, they deal with their own negative thought patterns, and they decide, I'm not going to be that person anymore.
And I think that that's been the biggest thing because when I've seen women do that, when they've been stuck in these negative thought patterns, and thank goodness I don't stay there very long. I mean, we all have negative thoughts, period. Like every day. But I mean, I'm not like generally a negative person. But somebody who has been a generally negative person all of a sudden come to the realization that they don't have to be like that anymore. And that the changing of their, and here comes the coach in me coming out, right? So the changing of their thoughts changes their feelings which then changes their behaviors, which then changes the outcomes that are around them. And that, I think, a really important message. I mean, I know we're talking about writing. Writing comes from your thoughts and your feelings. And if you're not, first of being honest about what you're thinking and feeling, and then secondly, deciding that you don't need the garbage anymore, and you want the good stuff, and you can make a change. You just have to start to change the way you think and not, and catch yourself when you're dwelling on the negative thoughts and say I'm done with that and I'm going to change my thought. I'm going think about something different.
Jane Jones (17:39)
And writing is a really good way to do that. I think I might have mentioned this with other interviews, but we start off learning to communicate speaking. And that's helpful or not helpful, and pleasant or unpleasant. Then we get sat down at a chair and told that it's time to now write. Theoretically, hopefully, some of us have been reading children's books being read to us and things like that. And, but now we have to start writing, and we're told how to write, do this, do this. And by the way, the thing that's really precious to you is your name. This is how you write your name as opposed to exploring it. So, a lot of times women, especially who are intuitive and very feeling based, take that part of themselves and put it away. So the one of the driving ideas is to encourage women to really stay writing, keep writing, get writing, and to find out that part of themselves that got put away or is not fully expressed because some of us have, like you did, experiences in school where they were very good experiences, some not so good and some really pretty awful.
However, but it's that idea of writing and the words we choose and the honesty that it brings to us is really valuable.
Deborah Owen (19:00)
So now my schooling wasn't all hunky-dory either. I wouldn't be back in fifth grade any day. That was my bad year.
Jane Jones (19:12)
People say, “I wish I was a kid.” Ah, no. I have made every year, think I'm hopefully better, but I never wanted to go back to yesterday.
Deborah Owen (19:23)
No, I'm on the other hand though, as writers, I could look back at fifth grade if I wanted to and pull lessons from that and pull that forward and say this is something that I learned from that really awful year in my life. And I'm sure that's actually not a bad thing for the writers who are listening or watching this interview to examine.
What was, yeah it was a sucky year, but what can I take from that? How can I make that better for myself and for the people around me? My children, my husband, my coworkers, whatever.
Jane Jones (19:58)
Yeah, and as women now begin to be encouraged more by other women to find what it is they want to say in good company and with the, you know, the active support of the men around us as well. I don't want to discount them at all.
Deborah Owen (21:15)
That's what we're all doing now. When I was a library teacher, I told my students to start a blog, to get themselves writing on the internet, create a digital footprint. That would be valuable for them. And I would tell our women writers the same thing. Start to create a digital footprint that would be valuable for you.
As far as I was concerned, we needed to teach children how to cross the road. You know, it's the internet highway. How do we cross that internet highway? How do we navigate that? And the schools were abdicating responsibility by blocking it from the schools. And I recognize the fact that it's distracting. I understand that. There are a lot of things in life that are distracting. I really felt like it was our role and responsibility as educators to take that on and teach children that. So that was why I wrote Social Media Fascination, which actually was a knitted-together series of interviews with some of the big-name internet people at the time. And then about a year and a half later I wrote my second book which is called Cupcakes for Dinner, and it has some great parenting tips at the beginning, and then I collected a whole lot of great recipes from my entrepreneurial colleagues. And so it's called Cupcakes for Dinner, and it's how to use cooking as a way to really connect with your children. I know that how important it is for somebody who has a book inside them to get it out. This could be a personal story.
It could be a business book. You could potentially have a book if you're grandparents and you have a wonderful story to tell and you don't want the family to lose your story. It's your legacy to share with your family. You may never sell a single copy but you can have them printed and given to your family members. How cool is that? It could be an institution like an art museum, or it could be a golf club that's been around for 100 years, or a school that has a long history. So those are books that can also be written.
Jane Jones (22:20)
Right.
So, get it done and get over that hurdle of the first time. The first thing the first marker.
Deborah Owen (22:28)
Yes. Right. So, if there's somebody here who has this book inside them and they, you know, maybe they don't like to type, maybe they don't like to handwrite, maybe they feel like they've got a little ADHD, and they have trouble organizing it.
Jane Jones (22:39)
Yeah, and there's, as you said, there's lots of, it's not necessarily a New York Times bestseller book. It's not a nonfiction thriller. It is something that somebody wants to put together for a teacher. It's somebody who wants to put it together for a school or somewhere that they do volunteer work or their families.
They want to have conversations. They want to put this stuff into a book or it's their own for their kids and it's a It's something that they to sit down and actually do it. It's loaded. But eliminate that you take that load off them and put it into a conversation, sort of like what we're doing now. Yeah. That people can hear, and then you can put it into a format that they can then present to their family for a gift.
Deborah Owen (23:12)
Yeah, and actually I love that and an easy way to do it is to just, if a younger person, could be 15, could be 35, a younger person wants to interview an older person and they do it on a recording and then they send that recording to rev.com or any of the other places that do the transcriptions and then they get the transcription back and really you just need to clean it up. You could even leave it in an interview form and then put it into a book if you wanted to. You don't even need to turn it into like typical prose, you can leave it as an interview.
Jane Jones (24:01)
Excellent, great. Well, Deborah, thank you very much. We are so grateful for your story and for your kindness and your generosity in coming and speaking with us today.
Deborah Owen (24:10)
This was great. Thank you so much, Jane. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Jane Jones (24:13)
Yeah, you're welcome. I'll just say goodbye to our listeners now. Thanks for listening and we look forward to next time. And bye Deborah, thanks again. Bye now.