Too many ideas buzzing about your head? Niki May Blane provides her top tips for harnessing creativity (and finally getting things done!)
Are you a popcorn person? I’m not asking if you like a good movie snack – I’m asking if you’re someone who has ideas popping around in your head all day long? You’re on a walk with the dog and Pop! There’s an idea. Sat on the toilet…Pop! Another idea. In a snoozefest of a meeting…Pop! There goes another…
Creativity is such a blessing, but it can be exhausting generating ideas all day long. And you might find that all of your energy is spent before you get around to actually creating anything. How demotivating! But don’t despair – if you’re having ideas, you have so much potential! The key is to just get them done, and that’s what I’m going to help you with.
That time that I invented the iPad
Harnessing creativity has been a historic challenge for me. I remember being at school and literally inventing the iPad…well, it was more like a portable digital news reader – a kind of Kindle with daily news downloads, but I thought of it 15 or so years before either were invented. Imagine if I’d had the money and resources (and talent and production capabilities…) to make a prototype! I didn’t, and the idea faded away as new ideas came to the fore.
When I became a content creator it was clear to me that I would need to find a way to channel that creativity in order to get stuff done. And that way was PROCESS! Here’s how it goes…
Step 1. Collate ideas accessibly
Write down all of the ideas that spring into your mind AS THEY HAPPEN. Do not do this with pen and paper – the chances are you won’t have your notepad with you at all times. But you probably do have your phone, so use its notepad function to keep all of your ideas in one place.
Label them if you can so that you can easily access them at once and see which buckets of ideas are proving most fruitful.
Step 2. Sit on your concepts
You might be tempted to jump right to creating your ideas as soon as you think of them. Don’t. Give them at least a week to mature in your mind. After that time you might find that a concept is still at the forefront of your mind…great! Others might have disappeared from your consciousness altogether. They’re probably not runners. Giving your creativity some time to settle can help you to separate the wheat from the chaff and also to help to build on your original concepts in a way you wouldn’t have had you charged ahead to create them right away.
Step 3. Sense check
This is so important. You might have the most fantastically creative idea in your pocket, but if it doesn’t sit well with your organisation’s objectives, or if it doesn’t align to your audience needs, then it’s just not going to fly. So sense check your idea before you waste your energy.
Step 4. Do your research
Once you have the green light to go ahead, do your research to make sure your content hits the right mark and answers all of the questions that your audience would expect of that content. Hit the search engines and see what others are saying about it. Don’t make the same content as others, make sure through your research that you are able to add value with what you are producing.
Step 5. Make the content work hard
I always recommend starting with a blog, because it will contain all of the core information that you need to create a multitude of assets that you can share across all of your channels. From a blog you can spawn a podcast, a video, graphics, pullquotes, emails, reels. So make your content work as hard as you have! Share multiple times across your channels using this variety of assets.
Blogs provide fantastic organic reach – especially if you’ve followed all of the previous steps. They provide value for your audience, a chance to demonstrate your expertise and an asset that you can direct your audience to that answers their questions, so one you’ve learned to harness your creativity, you’ll reap the benefits.
If you need more support to channel your creativity, Big Bee Content offers blog workshops that help to define your messaging and build a strategic plan for ongoing content. Get in touch and we’ll discuss how we can help.
About the Author
Niki May Blane is founder of Big Bee Content – our ‘Queen Bee’.
She can most commonly be found buzzing around her computer, delivering virtual workshops, creating copious amounts of copy and drinking coffee to combat the ill effects of non-sleeping children.
