Tap Into Your Blogging Creativity When You’re Stuck For Ideas
As a blogger, you may be your own boss and have a lot of creative freedom, but as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility.
Not only do you need to keep yourself on task, but you also need to stay creative in order to keep drawing a big audience to your blog. That can be a lot of pressure, which leads to things like writer’s block. If you’re having a lot o trouble staying creative, here are five ways to channel your creative side.
1. Brainstorming
If you are stuck for content for a particular topic or for a new topic, a good idea might be brainstorming. Give yourself a limited number of restrictions on what you will jot down and just write down whatever comes to your mind in a train of thought.
This will certainly lead to a few bad ideas in with the good ones, but the idea is to try to put everything currently on your mind on paper so that you can try to go from there and generate new ideas. Hopefully after just a few minutes you’ll have some good topic ideas and free up the creative side of your brain to keep fostering ideas.
2. Get Outside and Take a Walk
Sometimes being in a closed-in space can make it tough for you to come up with fresh new ideas. It can be freeing for your mind and body to get outside where you can move around a bit, take a walk and enjoy the scenery. It might also take you away from distractions like the television, a ringing phone or a string of e-mails. Those can all limit your ideas as well.
3. Share Your Ideas or Problems With Others
If you’re still stuck, try bouncing ideas with a trusted friend or colleague. You may even do this anonymously on an Internet forum. The goal is to put what you’ve got out there to see if anyone can add to it in a direction that gets you going again. They may also happen to bring up something in the conversation that you hadn’t thought of yet that gives you great ideas or inspiration.
4. Do a Mindless Task
It may seem counterproductive but if you are really jammed up for an idea, thinking about nothing can be the way to go just to release some of the stress and re-focus you. It is hard to think about nothing when you are trying to do so, but it isn’t so hard to do when you take up a menial task.
You could wash your dishes, clean up your room, walk the dog or organize your desk. Just remember not to multi-task and to focus in on the task at hand while you do it and pretty soon you should trick yourself into thinking about nothing at all.
5. Release Stress Through Laughter or Exercise
Often, stress can block ideas as you focus in more on the problem and less on the solution. That doesn’t get you anywhere. If you find yourself thinking of things like, “I have to get this done and I don’t know what I’m going to do,” as opposed to “How can I solve this problem?” it may be time to get some stress out.
Two proven ways to accomplish this are exercise and laughter, so either hit up one of your favorite comedians on YouTube or go for a run or a half hour or hour of exercise at your local gym.
This should get rid of some of the frustration and clear your mind a bit to dive back into the task at hand.
Valerie Mellema is the owner of Words You Want. Words You Want offers SEO writing services as well as guest blogging packages, eBooks, press releases, blog writing and more. Visit the Words You Want blog for weekly specials.