Tag Archives: Creativity

3 Steps to Take Yourself from Good to Great

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In a good economy, you can do reasonably well with “good enough.” Good enough design, good enough marketing, good enough skills. When demand is high and dollars are sloshing around, there’s a market for Decent. Capable. Adequate. Acceptable. Unfortunately, we’re not in a good economy. We’re in a wretched economy. Industries all over the world are falling like bowling pins, and “good enough” professionals in all fields are scrambling. There’s always room at the top, the guru says smugly. Don’t you want to smack that guy sometimes? How are you supposed to get to the top? And how are you supposed to pay your bills until you figure that out? But believe it or not, there’s a map to the top. And you don’t have to have superhuman skills, talent, or even perseverance to get there. Take these three (ok, four) simple steps. No, they’re not easy, but they are simple. You can do them. And you must do them. Good enough isn’t good enough anymore. Find out what you’re better at than anyone in the world Now before you start hyperventilating, hear me out. You’re probably not going to be the greatest copywriter or greatest web designer or the greatest dry cleaner on the face of the planet. You’re going to be the greatest in your world. The greatest copywriter for Dallas high-end commercial real estate, or Orange County chiropractors, or for B2B direct marketing in Bangalore. You’re going to find a world small enough, and then work your tail off to make yourself the greatest Doer-of-the-Thing-You-Do in that world. Sometimes you create a world of one. I’m the world’s greatest practitioner of Sonia-style marketing. Brian’s the world’s greatest Copyblogger. (I nip at his heels to keep him honest, but he’s still the greatest.) Seth is the world’s foremost Seth. Being “the world’s greatest you” isn’t an excuse to slack off, though. It means that every day you show up and try to do your thing a little better than you did yesterday. Find a viable business model If what you’re best at is playing Mozart sonatas on air guitar, even if you’re quite amazing at it, you may struggle to find paying customers. If it’s a business, you’ve got to get paid. Sometimes there are multiple strong business models for what you do, and it’s a matter of picking the one that suits you best. Sometimes one strategy will stand out. And sometimes, what you do is a very enjoyable passion, but it doesn’t form the kernel of a business. A viable business model isn’t a matter of will power or can-do attitude. The customers are either there or they aren’t. If they aren’t, keep framing and reframing your ideas and strengths until you find a market of buyers. Then offer them something they want (not need) to buy . Find something that gives you juice Remember when I mentioned working your tail off? Running a great business, even a business of one, isn’t easy. You’re going to have to be stubborn. You’re going to have to get past hurdles that make you uncomfortable. You’re going to have to give some things up, especially when you’re getting started. You’re going to have to care. A lot. And you’ll never do that if your business bores you to tears. Understand — you don’t have to necessarily love real estate to be the best agent in your well-defined world. You might love negotiation, or you might love the type of clients you focus on, or you might love playing matchmaker between houses and buyers. But you’ve got to adore something about it. It’s got to give you juice. It’s got to make you stronger . Otherwise you’ll run out of gas before you can make it happen. Of course this comes from the book Good to Great The three steps above are from Jim Collins’ groundbreaking book — he calls this trio the “ hedgehog concept .” (Hence the cute if slightly creepy small mammal at the top of this post.) These three factors aren’t just for copywriters and web designers — they’re for multinational conglomerates and billion-dollar empires. And they’re for soccer teams and nonprofits and musicians. I’d heard great things about Jim Collins’ book for years, but I never read it. I looked at it this way: Every idiot CEO and Dilbert-worthy executive in the country has read Good to Great . And from what I’ve seen, most of them couldn’t effectively manage a hamburger stand, much less run a great company. But then I read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness , and darn it, Hsieh does run a great company, and he found Good to Great essential reading. If I can pick up a $14 book that made Tony Hsieh smarter about business, don’t you think I should? So I did. And it’s brilliant. But I can also see why it failed. The crucial fourth step Collins (or more accurately, his team of researchers) found another common element in great companies. It’s certainly the case with Hsieh. You’ve got to love the business more than you do your own ego. The leaders of Collins’ great companies were, without exception. personally humble and self-effacing, but they were fanatically passionate and driven to make their companies succeed. If you’re in it for the Breitling, the house in the Hamptons, the thrill of watching minions scurry to carry out your personal immense vision, then your endeavor (small or large) is in deep trouble. (If your CEO is in business for these things, start looking for a way out now. Luckily, mine isn’t). If you’re crazy in love with the market you serve, the product you create, and the good that you do in the world (even if that good is a bit frivolous … frivolity can be a beautiful thing), you’re on to something big. Don’t stop. That’s why Good to Great didn’t create a million great companies. Every executive in America read it and puffed up with pride. “Why, we’re in luck! Humble and self-effacing, that’s me to a tee!” Self-delusion is a powerful thing But you’re more honest than that. You have the potential to level with yourself, and to step up your game. Good to Great is probably a pipe dream for most big companies — the entrenched egos are too giant to shift. More important, they don’t really want to. But you can hone your hedgehog concept. You can refuse to let yourself off the hook. And you can get the hell over yourself and start getting obsessed about helping people. And when you do, you’re going to do some amazing things. How about you? What has your own “good to great” journey looked like? Let us know in the comments what you’ve found along your path. About the Author : Sonia Simone is CMO of Copyblogger Media and founder of Remarkable Communication . Share your brushes with greatness with her on twitter .

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The Easy-to-Use Tool that Helps You Build a Breakthrough Blog

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As a digital branding and marketing agency , our company has encouraged, coached, and cajoled clients over the years on the importance of blogging for building traffic, buzz, and organic search. We watched some clients grow by leaps and bounds, attracting hundreds of thousands of blog visitors per month. And we watched others clients stumble along without ever gaining the momentum we were working for. Of course there are a lot of factors that drive success or failure. But among the blogs that succeeded on a huge scale, we noticed two common factors. First, the breakthrough blogs had a strong editorial calendar. And second, they used a thoughtful, strategic approach to managing editorial content. What is an editorial calendar, and why do you need one? An editorial calendar is just a fancy term for a publishing schedule. If you blog regularly, you should look ahead at least one month and make some decisions about which posts you want to publish on what dates. It’s really that simple. An editorial calendar is the foundation of strategic blogging. That little bit of planning goes a surprisingly long way toward getting the most audience reach from your blog content. 1. An editorial calendar lets you plan ahead By planning your posts ahead of time, you drive perseverance. An editorial calendar encourages blogging as a habit, wards off writer’s block, and ensures that you never miss another deadline. It’s a small, subtle thing, but you’ll be surprised at the difference it makes in your mindset. 2. An editorial calendar adds structure to your creativity Many bloggers worry that an editorial calendar will straitjacket their creativity. Actually, the opposite is true. Writing comes to many of us in waves. Struck by a bolt of inspiration, a blogger can write two or three posts in an afternoon. That’s fine — keep writing about what inspires you. Then use your editorial calendar to publish each post according to a plan that keeps your target audience in mind. Staring at that blank screen and trying to come up with a topic can be one of the most stressful aspects of blogging. But you’ll find that when you make those decisions weeks in advance, you actually come up with more and better ideas. You’ll be more creative, not less. 3. You can take a great concept further An editorial calendar is a powerful tool for maximizing the reach of your content, while removing the pressure of having to generate new concepts for each post. Say you’ve got a great topic in mind, one you know your readers care a lot about. There’s no reason to blow it all in one day. Would it make a valuable series, parceled out over a period of time and then gathered into a content landing page ? Could you run some interviews or line up some guest posts on the topic? Or go multimedia and round up a few engaging videos or cartoons on the subject? Whether you write everything yourself or use guest writers, planning ahead lets you group your content more effectively. Once you start looking at your blog a month at a time, you can develop patterns and make sure your content is well-balanced among all the readers you serve. 4. You can be proactive and capitalize on search trends When you pair planning with a strong foundation in SEO , you start to build your audience highly efficiently. An editorial calendar helps you pay better attention to key outreach strategies, such as blog post titles and link building. At a more advanced level, you can use it to plan and time posts related to your target audience’s search behaviors. Capitalizing on search activity can be as simple as timing posts and topics to synch with public holidays or product launches. Or it can be as complex as doing deep keyword analysis and planning content around trending search terms that will deliver maximum traffic to your blog. Why Stresslimit developed the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin After years of hacking together editorial calendars for our clients, using Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs, we wound up in a long discussion with our close friend (and brilliant engineer) Zack Grossbart. Beyond our mutual excitement about blogging and the power of editorial calendar strategy, we shared a passion for open source projects and wanted to give back to the WordPress community. We also wanted to develop a tool that would make our lives and coaching our clients more efficient, easier, and simply cooler. Our clients were excited about the idea of using an editorial calendar. But there was no single tool that enabled us to eliminate “busy work” and free up more time for strategizing and creativity. We were also in synch with Zack on our love for creating simple, intuitive interfaces that help people manage complex behaviors. An eight-month collaborative project was born: co-developing, co-designing and re-iterating the WordPress Editorial Calendar . We’re excited to announce the launch of version 1.0 of our editorial calendar plugin, which is (in our humble opinion) the killer tool for managing and driving the success of any blog — from the small and personal to the large and corporate. We invite you to take the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin for a spin at this link . It’s free, and we think you’re going to get a lot out of it. Here are some of the things you can do with the plugin See a month’s worth of posts at a glance. Juggle your calendar by simply dragging and dropping posts from day to day. Quickly edit your posts’ titles, contents, and publishing times. Publish posts or manage drafts. Instantly see the status of your posts. More easily manage posts from multiple authors. And you can do all of that right from the calendar interface itself. It’s simple and intuitive. No plugin alone can make you a brilliant strategist. But the WordPress Editorial Calendar is a tool that will encourage more strategic habits, thinking, and behavior. Check it out here . About the Authors: Justin Evans is the founding partner of design branding and online marketing agency Stresslimit . His clients include Fortune 500 companies, startups, NGOs, and global thought leaders. Zack Grossbart is a programmer and author whose sensitivity to user experience and design has driven success for many Fortune 500 companies. He blogs about code and about user experience design , and is releasing his first book as a free serialized release at The One Minute Commute . Editor’s Note: We use Stresslimit’s editorial calendar plugin here on Copyblogger, and we think it rocks. There’s no affiliate relationship, we just found it a nifty tool and think you’ll get a lot out of it.

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The Easy-to-Use Tool that Helps You Build a Breakthrough Blog

Copyblogger Weekly Wrap: Week of September 27, 2010

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Those who stalk me (and you know who you are) know that I’ve been talking a lot lately about “ Storyselling ,” which is a way to sell stuff using stories. But nothing is infallible, so I wanted to publicly announce some flaws I’ve found with it: Don’t use Storyselling with the police. Tell them about Uncle Phil’s hairpiece and they’ll still put you in jail for running over a Photomat booth with a city bus. (Don’t ask how I know this.) Don’t tell your story after being pushed off a building by the person you were trying to convince not to push you. Tell it before. After is too late. It’s amazing how many people get this one wrong. Don’t watch The Story of O with your grandmother, unless you enjoy uncontrolled squirming. Now, with that out of the way, let me tell you the story of what happened this week on Copyblogger: Monday: 50 Can’t-Fail Techniques for Finding Great Blog Topics I could give you an elaborate summary of this one, but really, the title says it all: it’s a collection of 50 can’t-fail techniques for finding great blog topics. Instead, I’ll spend this summary talking about Hollywood gossip. So… do you guys think Lady Gaga is a dude? Read the full post here . Tuesday: Want People To Read Your Sales Page? Make It Scannable To prove how true this post is, I scanned it only briefly to write this summary, and did so while driving a race car off a cliff. A lot of people are like me, so if your sales page is full of dense text that requires people to read every word, you’re going to turn us off. Also, after scanning this post, I’m pretty sure it was about waffles. Read the full post here . Wednesday: 8 Bad Habits that Crush Your Creativity And Stifle Your Success I totally get this one. Most people have the potential to be creative, but they do these 8 things that stifle creativity and make them boring. Don’t want to be boring? Then stop doing these 8 things, and also get a multicolored hat with a feather. Read the full post here . Thursday: Scribe 3.0: SEO Made Simple Hey, everyone, Scribe just got even better! I like Scribe. It’s cool for people like me who hate SEO because they think it gets in the way of your writing style, but then you get Scribe and it goes all ninja and suddenly you’re ranking well and life is grand. NOTE: Scribe does not include a pair of those little ninja slippers, exploding powder, or those shiny little stars you throw at people. Yet. Read the full post here . Friday: Why Getting Attention Won’t Make You Rich I was in a pink full-body suit, climbing the Sears Tower to drop lemons on pedestrians when I read this post — and just in time. Attention may be the first step to building a lucrative business, but it’s not the only one. In this post, Sonia Simone outlines what else you need to do in order to convert attention to currency. For me? I’m selling “I got hit with a lemon by a pink guy and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” t-shirts. Read the full post here. This week’s cool links: Signs That Blogging is Not Only Alive, But More Critical Than Ever : Think that blogging is dead? Um, no. That would be a stupid thing to think. Digg Founder “Burned Out,” May Leave by End of 2010 : Kevin Rose has had it, and reading this, I think I’d be expecting a “postal” reaction out of him. Can we get Pete Rose in there instead? Trouble Choosing a Niche? Start a Personal Blog : If you’re not sure what to blog about, Darren Rowse suggests starting a personal blog as a testing ground. (Note to self: It’s possible to have a business blog that isn’t all about yourself? Strange, but possibly true.) 14 Incredibly successful ways to stand out from the crowd : Like monster * posts? This one about finding a way to stand out in an otherwise crowded space will suit you well. * Does not contain Cookie Monster. ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’ Comes True In Age of Twitter, Facebook : The book The Cluetrain Manifesto , written in 2000, is totally being proven true a decade later. (Also, it describes a train on which you can play the game “Clue.” My money is on Professor Plum in the parlor with the candlestick.) About the Author: Johnny B. Truant wants you to know that his new course Storyselling 101 is half price this weekend and says “You should totally get it now.”

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Copyblogger Weekly Wrap: Week of September 27, 2010

8 Bad Habits that Crush Your Creativity And Stifle Your Success

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“The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts the moment you get up and doesn’t stop until you get into the office.” ~ Robert Frost It’s a myth that only highly intelligent people are creative. In fact, research shows that once you get beyond an I.Q. of about 120, which is just a little above average, intelligence and creativity are not at all related. That means that even if you’re no smarter than most people, you still have the potential to wield amazing creative powers. So why are so few people highly creative? Because there are bad habits people learn as they grow up which crush the creative pathways in the brain. And like all bad habits, they can be broken if you are willing to work at it. Here are eight of the very worst bad habits that could be holding you back every day: 1. Creating and evaluating at the same time You can’t drive a car in first gear and reverse at the same time. Likewise, you shouldn’t try to use different types of thinking simultaneously. You’ll strip your mental gears. Creating means generating new ideas, visualizing, looking ahead, considering the possibilities. Evaluating means analyzing and judging, picking apart ideas and sorting them into piles of good and bad, useful and useless. Most people evaluate too soon and too often, and therefore create less. In order to create more and better ideas, you must separate creation from evaluation, coming up with lots of ideas first, then judging their worth later. 2. The Expert Syndrome This a big problem in any field where there are lots of gurus who tell you their secrets of success. It’s wise to listen, but unwise to follow without question. Some of the most successful people in the world did what others told them would never work. They knew something about their own idea that even the gurus didn’t know. Every path to success is different. 3. Fear of failure Most people remember baseball legend Babe Ruth as one of the great hitters of all time, with a career record of 714 home runs. However, he was also a master of the strike out. That’s because he always swung for home runs, not singles or doubles. Ruth either succeeded big or failed spectacularly. No one wants to make mistakes or fail. But if you try too hard to avoid failure, you’ll also avoid success. It has been said that to increase your success rate, you should aim to make more mistakes. In other words, take more chances and you’ll succeed more often. Those few really great ideas you come up with will more than compensate for all the dumb mistakes you make. 4. Fear of ambiguity Most people like things to make sense. Unfortunately, life is not neat and tidy. There are some things you’ll never understand and some problems you’ll never solve. I once had a client who sold a product by direct mail. His order form broke every rule in the book. But it worked better than any other order form he had ever tried. Why? I don’t know. What I do know is that most great creative ideas emerge from a swirl of chaos. You must develop a part of yourself that is comfortable with mess and confusion. You should become comfortable with things that work even when you don’t understand why. 5. Lack of confidence A certain level of uncertainly accompanies every creative act. A small measure of self-doubt is healthy. However, you must have confidence in your abilities in order to create and carry out effective solutions to problems. Much of this comes from experience, but confidence also comes from familiarity with how creativity works. When you understand that ideas often seem crazy at first, that failure is just a learning experience, and that nothing is impossible, you are on your way to becoming more confident and more creative. Instead of dividing the world into the possible and impossible, divide it into what you’ve tried and what you haven’t tried. There are a million pathways to success. 6. Discouragement from other people Even if you have a wide-open mind and the ability to see what’s possible, most people around you will not. They will tell you in various and often subtle ways to conform, be sensible, and not rock the boat. Ignore them. The path to every victory is paved with predictions of failure . And once you have a big win under your belt, all the naysayers will shut their noise and see you for what you are — a creative force to be reckoned with. 7. Being overwhelmed by information It’s called “analysis paralysis,” the condition of spending so much time thinking about a problem and cramming your brain with so much information that you lose the ability to act. It’s been said that information is to the brain what food is to the body. True enough. But just as you can overeat, you can also overthink. Every successful person I’ve ever met has the ability to know when to stop collecting information and start taking action . Many subscribe to the “ready – fire – aim” philosophy of business success, knowing that acting on a good plan today is better than waiting for a perfect plan tomorrow. 8. Being trapped by false limits Ask a writer for a great idea, and you’ll get a solution that involves words. Ask a designer for a great idea, and you’ll get a solution that involves visuals. Ask a blogger for a great idea, and you’ll get a solution that involves a blog. We’re all a product of our experience. But the limitations we have are self-imposed. They are false limits. Only when you force yourself to look past what you know and feel comfortable with can you come up with the breakthrough ideas you’re looking for. Be open to anything. Step outside your comfort zone. Consider how those in unrelated areas do what they do. What seems impossible today may seem surprisingly doable tomorrow. If you recognize some of these problems in yourself, don’t fret. In fact, rejoice! Knowing what’s holding you back is the first step toward breaking down the barriers of creativity. How about you? What mental habit has been hardest on your creativity? Let us know in the comments how you’ve handled it. About the Author: Dean Rieck is one of America’s most creative advertising copywriters. He shares his writing and freelancing experience at Pro Copy Tips .

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8 Bad Habits that Crush Your Creativity And Stifle Your Success

50 Can’t-Fail Techniques for Finding Great Blog Topics

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It’s one thing to know you need to create lots of great content . It’s another to actually know what you’re going to write about this week. Are you out of ideas for blog posts? Small wonder, if the only place you’re looking is inside your own head. We all need inspiration … and you’re not going to find it banging your head against the desk and hoping an idea falls out. You need fresh inspiration if you’re going to come up with new ideas. To help get your inspirational motor running, here are 50 techniques for generating great blog post topics. Two words: Google alerts . Set an alert with a few industry key words, and ask it to deliver at least 20 stories a day. Read the headlines and throw interesting links into a file for future use. When you get several related stories, you’ve got an instant roundup piece. Skim national newspapers and magazine stories. How does national news such as the recession affect your readers? Talk about national trends, and your audience will come to rely on you to tailor big news to address their concerns. Ask yourself, “What’s missing?” or “What will happen next?” Answer the questions those national rags didn’t address. What’s the next domino that will likely fall as a result of this piece of news? Point it out, and your readers will feel you (and they) are ahead of the curve. Read small publications. If you have an expertise blog, check the experts’ columns in local papers or business weeklies. Few people outside your community will have read these, and their topics are often easily recycled. Read trade publications. Trade pubs cover every imaginable industry and they’re a great source of trend ideas, from Ad Age to TWICE (This Week in Electronics). They’ll also track new companies and products you might mention (see #39). Read your competitors. I subscribe to several competing blogs on my iGoogle desktop, for real-time headline scanning. If you write on a similar topic, you can give the other blog link love. Riff on a popular post. Grab yourself some high-powered linkage by posting your reaction to a big-time blogger’s thoughts. Try a new medium. Burned out on the blogosphere? Look at YouTube videos, listen to podcasts, or watch good ol’ fashioned TV shows or radio broadcasts. Think about pain. What are the biggest problems your readers face? Focus on topics that would provide balm to their wounds. Talk to a friend. That’s right — use your lifeline, just like on the reality TV shows. Jawing about a problem usually helps ideas bubble up. Tackle a controversy. Weigh in on your industry’s hot topic. This can be especially effective if you have a contrarian viewpoint . Join a blogger’s group. Knowing your group will ask what you’re posting should help concentrate the mind. Hearing what they’re blogging on will no doubt suggest subjects for you to cover, too. Scan industry conference schedules. The list of session topics offers a quick guide to your audience’s hot-button issues. Get a critique. Find a mentor. Have them look over your blog and point out what’s missing. Mine your hobbies. People love posts that offer an unusual perspective on your topic. For instance, I once did a post called 7 Things I Learned About Business From Playing Bejeweled Blitz . Do an interview. Do you have a favorite thinker in your space? Get in touch. You’ll be surprised how many authors and thought leaders are game for a quick Q&A. Review your greatest hits. Read your most popular past blogs. Look for ways to take a slightly different angle and further illuminate the same topic. Write a sequel. If something has happened recently that puts a new light on a past blog post, update your readers. Write a new entry and link it back to the old one. Have a debate.

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50 Can’t-Fail Techniques for Finding Great Blog Topics