Blogger James Altucher advocates actively coming up with ten ideas a day in order to become what he calls an “idea machine.” It is his contention that this ability is essential to anyone who wants to be successful in the developing “idea economy.” Personally, I have found this and other similar exercises to be an effective way to come up with new and interesting content on a consistent basis for SEO purposes.
The ability to create content is a muscle that can be built up just like those actual muscles that develop through strenuous exercise. The key is to challenge this ability on a daily basis. There are many techniques that can be used for this purpose. As previously mentioned, James Altucher advocates the easy technique of making a list of ten ideas every day. The ideas should be related to a specific task or goal. For example, a content creator who is tasked with writing a blog post every day might strive to come up with a list of ten possible blog topics. Then for each of these topics the content creator can come up with ten points to bring up in each article.
When doing this exercise it is important to keep in mind that it is only an exercise. That is, there is nothing riding on it and there will be no grades. The goal of the exercise is to stimulate the part of the brain that creates ideas. If continuously stimulated, over time it will become easier and easier to create content seemingly out of nothing. Part of this exercise requires the content creator to allow himself or herself to come up with “bad” ideas. Both good and bad ideas will count as ideas for the purposes of this exercise. In fact a good idea will probably arrive on average for every ten bad ideas conceived. Accordingly, if the content creator did not allow himself or herself those ten bad ideas he or she would never arrive at the good one.
One client I create content for has created a group of blog sites that essentially acts as a link farm in order to optimize the content of other client websites. I have no illusion that any of the content I create for these blogs is being read by an actual human being unless they find themselves on the page by accident. The purpose of these blogs seems to be to create links that point back to the target sites. The existence of these links on a supposedly neutral third party site is one factor that search engine spiders look for in order to measure how relevant the target website is. The more relevant it is the higher it will be ranked in the search engine’s listings. I bring this up only to say that writing for these blogs is an excellent opportunity to stimulate the part of my brain that allows me to create content. Much like creating lists of ideas, this activity or any activity that requires the content creation muscle to “sweat” so to speak will be an effective way to develop it.
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