If you write a B2B or B2C blog chances are that sometimes – even if you’re a team of bloggers – you need to mix things up a bit. You need to breathe some life into your blog and blogging.
It’s human nature that we all get a bit bored doing the same thing day in day out. We all like something different now and again to spice life up. And business blogs are no different.
Once a week you could introduce a vlog or picture post to do something different. Film or take pics around the office showing what your team are up to, how proud you are of your new coffee machine, how embarrassed “Steve” is from being filmed.
If once a week is too much for your formal C-suite, then maybe once a month is better. Or in my case this whole month! But sometimes you really need to learn to be creative.
Be Creative to Get Creative
I taught Creative Writing for many years to would-be writers. One of things I always got students to do was try out different voices, different styles of writing, different techniques. As a writer you discover that your voice changes the more you experiment, the more you dare to be different. It’s important as a writer to go through periods when you literally force yourself out of your comfort zone.
For me, writing and teaching with blogs back in the late 2019’s actually opened a new window for me as I discovered I was more comfortable with a writing blogs with my own blogging voice, and I moved away from being only marketing executioner despite having spent almost 10 years there without knowing how to write. As such, creativity lead me down a different route entirely to the one I had started on.
Business Blogger? Dare to be different
Fiction writers and poets get to go on retreats to develop their writing, but business bloggers don’t. Sure, they can go on one-day writing courses and seminars but they mostly focus on SEO, link-building, and the other aspects of increasing your ROI.
But very few of these courses – at least from what I’ve seen and heard – encourage you to dare to be different.
So here are 5 writing exercises to help you as a blogger embrace the creative writer in you:
1) Write in the “voice” of your favorite blogger.
It will still be “your voice” because no two writers are the same. But you’ll enjoy the freedom to try out something new.
2) Write Really Quickly
Speed writing gets you past your inhibitions. Writing under a time constraint forces you to dig deep and think quickly. You’ll be surprised what you can come up with taking this kind of approach. Then use your editorial brain to tidy it up and craft it into something publishable.
3) Swap Blog Posts
Give a title or subject to someone in your team (or if you’re a sole writer, get someone else to give you a title) and let your imagination wander. We all have a different take on things but often it can be refreshing to be shown the first steps of a new path. That’s how I like to think of this kind of exercise.
4) Write Somewhere You’ve Never Written Before
Go on. Think about it. Have you ever blogged from the library? On the train? An art gallery. In a café straight after a meeting with a client? New environments stimulate new thoughts and creativity. If you’re forced to blog behind the same desk five days a week it’s understandable that inspiration can be hard to find sometimes. So get out of the office and embrace your creative self.
5) Interview Someone
There’s nothing like getting new ideas for blog posts after talking to someone and asking questions. Give yourself a topic, find someone who is an expert or might have an interesting position on this and then go ask them about it. Blog interviews often make for a different kind of blog post; but more than that, it’s important to get new ideas and new influences.
Image Credit: https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2019/08/Aug19_27_175717025.jpg
