Shaun Low

There comes a point in every blogger’s life when, despite their best efforts, they find themselves scraping the bottom of the barrel. Maybe it’s the heat in the dead of summer, the fact that everyone is on vacation while you toil away at the old keyboard, or just a bit of old-fashioned burnout.

Regardless of the cause of your blogger’s angst, if you blog for a living, you’ve got to find a way to push through it, Rocky! In general, I find that the bloggers who write the most compelling content are the ones with well-rounded interests, which helps to keep them from regurgitating the same content in different flavors.

Here are a couple of suggestions that I personally find helpful, but I’m interested to hear what you other bloggers do to help shake and bake on your slow days. 

Listen to better music –

If you walk around the Ignite office, you will find each of us with earbuds firmly in place, mainly because if we didn’t respect each other’s musical choices by doing so, then we’d all be subjected to the throbbing beats of Brian Chappell’s house music. If you’re feeling a little uninspired, you should probably start by getting better tunes.

The Hype Machine is a site that aggregates content from hand-picked music blogs, giving you the ability to listen right on the site. An interesting feature they just added is the Twitter Music Chart, which lists songs in order of popularity based on tweets. It’s a convenient way to find new music and see what others are currently loving (the past few weeks, it’s been a lot of inspiring Michael Jackson remixes).

Use More Interesting Photos –

Not that I don’t love browsing iStockphoto as much as the next girl with bangs, but sometimes those photos can wind up looking, well, generic. You don’t have to be a Photoshop stud to whip up something that will be fun to look at when you’ve got plenty of photo editing sites at your disposal to help. Here’s a list of 28 photo editing sites and the various effects and styles they can help create. Because a wordsy blog post without eye candy just won’t do. 

Play Games –

Specifically, word games. These are excellent for shaking loose some of the Scrabble tiles in your head and getting you into that authorial mindset. The world of social media has us all addicted to the brevity of LOLspeak, so sometimes it can take a minute to remind yourself of syntax and all those lovely vocabulary words you learned for the GRE’s. Word games keep your writerly mind sharp, and when your boss walks by and asks if this is what he’s paying you for, simply smile sweetly and say yes…yes it is.

Stop Talking –

I know it’s difficult, with everyone passing by your desk and telling you about how well their weekend dates went, but stop running your mouth for a sec, ‘kay? Talking utilizes one side of your brain (the left side), and it’s difficult to engage the other side, which is visual and intuitive and can help you get in touch with some of that deeper creativity. Try not talking, and instead engage in some sort of visual activity, like creating your own Jackson Pollock painting. The combination of the two will help you switch over into the more lush creative environments in your mind.

Get a Creative Prompt –

Hanging in our office bathroom is a whiteboard, which serves as the location for some of our most inappropriate creative prompts and questions. It’s a place where we can build off one another’s responses, sort of like written improv. While you may not have such evolved tools at your disposal, you can always visit a blog that provides you with prompts, which you can scroll through until you find something that you like.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Comments?

About The Author

Olivia Hayes has nurtured multiple corporate blogs from infancy into a healthy adolescence, word wrangled marketing campaigns for clients like InDemand and Sirius, and helped envision promotional event concepts for Planned Parenthood NYC. Olivia is the Copywriter and a contributing writer for Ignite Social Media.

Posted in: The Net |

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 8:57 am and is filed under The Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.