3 Valuable Posts to Help You Jump-Start Your Creativity

I publish a bi-weekly post featuring my favorite posts of the month and today I’m focusing on three posts that I think you’ll love.

Each article below will give you the impetus to bust a move. If you have a bit more time, Tim Soulo takes a deep-dive into fundamental strategies to promote your blog, while Kevin Kelly has beautifully cranked out 68 golden nuggets of unsolicited advice.

As usual, I’m featuring these posts because the authors bring razor-sharp, thoughtful, and actionable ideas to help you get more creative and maybe change things up a bit.

1. 5 Ideas For The Interested This Week

By Josh Spector
@jspector

I’ve been following Josh Spector since I heard him interviewed on the Everyone Hates Marketers podcast and it’s for good reason; Josh has a noteworthy newsletter called For The Interested chock-full of A1 advice to help his audience become better at work, art, and life.

I found the May 2nd For The Interested particularly helpful for a variety of reasons.

His first idea, a Medium post, How To Jump Start Your Blog When Traffic Flatlines was written for bloggers who want to get out of a rut.

But what usually flows from Josh is not the typical cookie-cutter advice. No. His style is to deliver helpful, actionable steps you can run with.

The Jump Start post features several extra helpful tidbits, especially this one…

(Re)Define Your Goal: That is, ponder why you want to blog NOW and what you wish to achieve with your writing. And then fill in the blanks of this sentence:

“I write blog posts to help [INSERT TARGET AUDIENCE] [INSERT DESIRED VALUE].”

He offers several examples to move you along if you’re trying to reset your blog. But he doesn’t stop there. If your trying to restart your blog and are looking for fresh, creative ideas on how to do so, it’s well worth taking a look.

“Don’t assume you must write about the same topics you’ve always written about — instead, consider what you’d be excited to write about tomorrow.”

2. 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

By Kevin Kelly
@kevin2kelly

And, since we are talking about Josh’s newsletter, he features another fun but insightful post from Kevin Kelly, author of the famous 1,000 true fans theory.

So have some fun and take a look at Kevin’s clever bits of advice. Here are a few of my favorites…

“Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.”

Oh YEAH! “A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.”

“Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.”

“To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.”

3. How to Promote Your Blog: 7 Fundamental Strategies

By Tim Soulo via Ahrefs
@timsoulo

Sorry, this was published in April, but I read it in May 😉

If you’re fed up with the same old “create great content” advice this is the read you need. Okay, Tim mentions creating great content 😉 BUT you need to stay with him on this one. As he writes…

“3. Create share-worthy content

I wanted to start my post with this strategy, but I was afraid that you’d roll your eyes and close it immediately. I do not doubt that you’re fed up with the same old “create great content” advice.

But now that you’ve read the two previous strategies, I hope that you’ll give me a chance to expand on this one…”

He does indeed expand on this but does so in a practical, helpful, and downright businesslike way.

It’s a well-thought-out post. In fact, I keep coming back to it. It’s that good!

If you’re a scanner (I won’t judge) he has great callouts and “Pro Tips” highlighted throughout.

The wrap: There are some great ideas here. My suggestion? Take one of Tim’s ideas and run with it.

An added benefit? You’ll learn about the “Spike of hope” to the “Flatline of nope.”

“Whenever new people sign up to your email list, it’s highly likely that they haven’t read all the excellent content you’ve already published on your blog.

Here at Ahrefs, we have a simple autoresponder sequence that sends out a dozen or so of our best articles to every new subscriber.”