Are you being as creative as you can be?

Guest Post By Jessica Wright

If I am asked, I would say that everyone has the potential to be creative. At least in one field. We are all born with imagination and the possibility of day dreaming. Our unused creativity comes out at night too, when dreaming. But, as any feature, there are things that stop us from being creative, like excessive demands, distractions, lack of discipline or not knowing what to do with our energy. How can we avoid this obstacles and canalise our energy to boost our creativity?

Wake up your curiosity and interest

Pay attention to the world around you, find out new things and discover new places. Ask yourself about the meaning of something, write down 5 things you would like to know about and then search them. Anything that drives your curiosity needs to be checked.

Avoid the routine

Take something different for breakfast. Talk to someone new. Do something “crazy”. Make sushi, or a cake, or bake cookies to take to work. Change your way home. Keep your life organised and within a timetable, but don’t always the same things.

Work on your self-control and discipline

Follow the same timetables for your food and rest. Find out in which moment of the day your mind is more awake and spend this time concentrated in something. Relax and feel free of stress at least once a day. Go running for 10 minutes every night. Feel comfortable with your environment, it doesn’t need to follow Zen rules, but to be organized while you like it. Sum up your day before going to bed and think about what you would have done different.

Find out what you are missing and go for it. If it is a matter of time, make time for it. Fight against your weaknesses and make the most of your strengths. If you like writing, start a blog; if you like cooking, take a cooking class; if you like singing, sing to your friends. Nothing will change if you don’t make use of it, so keep developing your creativity in every little thing.

Develop your inner creativity

Find out what you are missing and go for it. If it is a matter of time, make time for it. Fight against your weaknesses and make the most of your strengths. If you like writing, start a blog; if you like cooking, take a cooking class; if you like singing, sing to your friends. Nothing will change if you don’t make use of it, so keep developing your creativity in every little thing.

Find new ways of solving old problems

Look at the problems from as many points of view as possible. Think about them from new perspectives, as child would see them, as a person from another culture would see them, as your grandma would see them. Imagine different scenarios for each problem depending on different ways of responding. Ask yourself again and again.

Choose an special field

If you really want to develop your creativity as much as possible and build your life around it, you should consider starting/changing to a career in where to use it. Common creative jobs are the ones related to the arts: music, painting, acting, writing… But don’t just think about the main popular roles like singer or actress, as well as creativity you need talent for those. Think more  of a role behind the scenes like working as a graphic designer or for a subtitling company in the film industry.

Follow all of this and more, creating a routine of non-routine, and you will start seeing few little changes in you. Sometimes we don’t find time in our fast pace lives to meditate and let our creativity flow free, and we can’t allow that because it is part of us as persons, not animals or machines.

 

10 Content Marketing musts

Guest Post By Jessica Wright

When you are creating content with marketing purposes, you are doing it for Google to “read” you, but also, and maybe most importantly, for your visitors to engage with you. Without forgetting which your final objective is (brand exposure, leads, sales…), all your content needs to be useful and accessible.

Here are some rules you must follow regarding your content marketing:

1. Publish. Again: publish.

It is very straight forward, but still easily forgotten: you need to publish periodically. Your content needs to be updated. Any update will refresh it, like embeded tweets. Even if you think your website is perfectly finished, your site needs to be alive. Publish at least once a week and you will be active. Create a blog inside your site and keep it updated. Even if your content goes to another site. Link it, mention it, just write something.

2. Optimize your content for SEO.

Before writing you need to check the keywords people are using to search about the topic you are going to write for. Your content needs to be optimized, as well as informative. You can even do an specific SEO work for different landing pages and look for different ways of attracting people to your site. Then go to Google Analytics and check if you are doing things right. Optimizing your content also means taking into account headings, internal links, external links, writing on images and a long to do list that will make your content useful not only because of its words .

3. Engage with your content:

If you make your visitors happy with useful and entertaining content, they will stay longer, read your other posts, share and participate. Usability is very important for Google, as well as the time people stay in your site. If you create a buzz around your content by generating one that is worth talking about, it will be even better. In order to give to your audience what they want, you need to know what it is. Ask them, analyse them (Google Analytics will let you know their time on page, bounce rate, etc), try different things, and once you think you know what they want, start over.

4. Create long content:

Don’t be boring and meaningless, but the longer your content is, the longer your visitors will stay at your page. Embed videos within your content too, it will allow you to keep your visitors for longer. Some people prefer short readings, so organise your content and make it easy to read with headlines, images, abstracts, etc. But be careful not to increase the loading time of your site.

5. Think about all your visitors, including mobile and tablet ones.

How many times you haven’t been able to read something because it was just impossible through your mobile phone? With smartphones and tablets used for out of the house and in the house entertainment, it is an imperative that your content is 100% easy to read through these devices. You can check these stats too with your Google Analytics to find out about your audience and your performance. It is worthwhile to invest in the best way of adapting your content to all devices or making a mobile version of it.

6. Connect and participate with your community.

Humanize your brand, join the conversation. Only this way you will get people to engage with you, to be interested in your content and share it. Talk to people, let them know that you last post is awesome and will change their lives. If you don’t say it, it will never be known! Answer to every question, make the most of every comment. It will help your customers and Google will reward you. Link your content marketing with your Social Media, it is all part of the same strategy.

7. Create a post publishing to do list for every article.

Once your articles are ready to publish, they need to follow a process to make the most of them. And this process needs to be listed and checked every time. First of all, share it on all your Social Media: Facebook, Facebook pages, Twitter, Pinterest, Google +, LinkedIn groups, YouTube, etc. Then share it on any other networks and content distributors like Stumble Upon. Share you link in comments, groups, anything. Your articles are more visible during the firs 4 days, so you need to work on their distribution just after publishing.

8. Guest Blogging:

Write some articles in other blogs as a guest writer. It is useful to build your authority, drives new readers to your site and gives you quality links that point to your site. Good for you and good for SEO. Also, you can accept guest posts in compensation, but always if it is useful for your audience.

9. Take care of your readers.

Make it easy for them, give them the option to follow you, to comment, to find older posts. And take off any unnecessary things that are not adding (affiliate ads that don’t give you money, for instance). Your content needs to look professional, neat and user friendly.

10. Call to action.

What is your objective when posting an article? Brand awareness? Generate sales? Loyalty? Once you have set up your goals, you need to measure them. To do so, you need to set up a call to action (a click that directs visitors to fill up a contact form, download a PDF, comment the post, etc.).

This article has been written by Jessica Wight (@JessicaWight3), copywriter at Gloc Media, a SEO agency in London