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- 🎭 Creation, mastery, & your growth
🎭 Creation, mastery, & your growth
Hey you 👋
If you've been in a creative rut as of lately, this is dedicated to you.
Creativity doesn't get talked about enough when it comes to marketing.
And yes, marketing is very much a science as it is an art — analytics are important. But, humans don't always relate to spreadsheets. They relate to emotions.
And being creative in your work, when it feels like you have too many responsibilities to handle, is a very very hard thing to do.
So, let's talk about three concepts that, hopefully, will leave you with a new perspective on how to find your creativity (and channel it).
Concept 1: Overcoming creative blocks. We all go through our own ruts. Sometimes it can feel like a few days, sometimes a few weeks, and sometimes most of the year. It's important to realize that life works in seasons, so be gentle with the season you're currently in.
But, creative blocks tend to happen when you lack either inspiration, motivation, or confidence. And the way you begin to overcome creative block is to create rituals in your life that bring you structure. Because, structure gives you a framework that can guide you even when inspiration is lacking. Let's explain in concept 2.
Concept 2: The importance of rituals over routines. A lot of people say that in order to be "successful" you need routines. And while that sentiment isn't wrong, it misses something important — intention. Routines are a series of tasks that we perform. Rituals are actions we take with meaning and intention. Rituals require mindfulness, which in turn is how we begin to overcome our creative blocks.
For example, a writer may have a ritual each morning to brew a certain type of tea while sitting in a specific spot to write for 30 minutes before they start their day. In the book, The Artist's Way, the author, Julia Cameron, explains how it's crucial that we journal three pages of a "stream of consciousness" each morning. This is dubbed as Morning Pages, and is a powerful ritual for becoming more mindful about your thoughts and emotions.
The idea here is that creating a ritual that you stick to each day will give your brain a signal that it's time to switch into creative mode. And over time, this can help you cultivate a state of creative flow more easily.
Once you're in this creative flow, the next step is to learn how to channel it to generate groundbreaking ideas, concepts, blogs, YouTube videos, email newsletters, you name it. This is where concept 3 comes to play.
Concept 3: Structure in creativity. When we think of creative genius we often think about original ideas. But the worst thing you can do for yourself is to pressure yourself into believing that you have to be original from day one. If you're in a creative rut, don't be original. In fact, if you look at different forms of media, be it songs, articles, videos, movies, TV shows, etc., you'll notice that they all have some sort of structure.
Writing for SEO requires you to structure your headings a certain way. Writing dance music requires that you produce at 128 beats per minute and know when the drop is supposed to hit. Directing a movie requires that you know how to be a great storyteller. Most forms of art have a structure to them.
So the idea here is to find inspiration from creators you admire, understand how they structure their art, and copy the structure. But, you use your own creative flow within that structure. This is how you produce great work that begins to get recognized.
Think about this newsletter, there's a structure that does not change. But the content within that structure changes each week. Apply that concept to your art. Then, over time, as you develop mastery, you can experiment by modifying your structure into something new. And if people resonate with that, you'll find that others will start to copy your structure (the ultimate form of feedback when you're doing something right).
Hopefully these concepts help you realize that you are a creative being. But your frustration most likely comes from a block, a lack of understanding for structure, or both.
If it's a block, commit yourself to doing Morning Pages or create a ritual that requires you to be in a state of flow. If it's because you have no framework, copy someone's structure. And if it's both... well, you know what to do.
With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):
Marketing news from the past week (lots from Google)
The future is product-led marketing
How to collab with influencers (with examples)
What Google Perspectives means for SEOs
How to improve conversion rates during a redesign
Ad from the past
Website of the week
Cool marketing jobs
And much more
🗞 In the news
🚀 All things growth & product
The four best growth design patters, common myths about reducing churn, studying your most successful competitors, and a product-led marketing deep dive.
💭 Guess the riddle
What is a word with five letters that becomes shorter when you add two letters to it?
Answer is at the bottom of this email
✍️ Content, social, & emails
How to do keyword research for SaaS, how to write better ChatGPT prompts, nine ways to collaborate with influencers, and the best email newsletter templates.
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⚙️ SEO
Making sure your website content is crawlable, investing in branded keywords, Google's Perspectives filter, the ultimate guide for internal linking.
Low-key one of the most exciting developments in SEO and biggest opportunities for publishers in a while… if you can figure out how to make it work 😉😉
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc)
4:37 PM • May 15, 2023
💯 Analytics & CRO
The purpose of event data, lessons about SaaS pricing for conversions, and a website CRO checklist.
🧠 Extra stuff
Techniques for evaluating someones character, can ChatGPT make you a better manager, and creating a business vs creating art.
📣 Ad from the past
(Life Savers ad from the 1931)
🍊 = 🍬? 🧐
💻 Website of the week
🏝 Cool remote marketing jobs
Okay, that's it for now 🖤. See you next Tuesday!
What did you think of this newsletter? |
“I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.” — Gary Keller
Riddle answer: Short