Heaven help me, I shouldn’t be telling you this. It’s like when the curtain was lifted in “The Wizard of Oz.”
But there are times when all of us get a brain freeze. We know we need to create great content for a blog, but the creative synapses just aren’t firing. And the very nature of writing—it’s usually a solitary venture—makes it worse.
We all have our own ways to find inspiration. In some work environments, coworkers get together regularly for brainstorming sessions. They are inspired by and are able to feed off of the ideas others generate. Often this creates a situation where the final, useful ideas are of greater value than any single shared idea.
Many content creators can’t do that, so they need other tactics. Here are strategies that will thaw your brain and get the killer content flowing again.
Covert Ops
There’s nothing new under the sun. Live with it. In fact, embrace it and find the best of what’s gone before and give it your personal touch. The key is to discover what has worked for others in your field. The best way I’ve found to do that is to use Blogger Jet’s “Strip the Blog” tool.
You simply enter the URL of a blog, define a date range — increments from one week to two months — and it gives you a list of articles and the number of social shares each garnered. Make sure you use the URL that corresponds to where articles are posted on the website.
For example, at AllBusiness.com, articles are posted at experts.allbusiness.com. Entering the wrong URL won’t return any results.
The great thing about Strip the Blog is that it returns a list with all the social shares from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest so you can find the social media sites that are important to you. For one person, Facebook shares may be important; for another, LinkedIn might be the holy grail.
The next step is to look for common threads that run through the articles that receive the most social shares. Be a little skeptical if some numbers seem unreasonably high. People are known to game these, especially if there’s a commercial product involved.
When you find a winner, steal it. Okay, don’t exactly steal it, but develop your own slant on it. Another great approach when you find a winner is to take exactly the opposite position. We all love reading what the contrarians have to say!
Read more: How to Create Great Content Despite a Brain Freeze
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