Chris Sharrock is the Dean of Arts at Camberwell University and earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit one of his lectures. In it, he spoke of his experiences as a Professor and how he has developed his own technique for being creative on demand.

Of course, this is never as easy as it sounds. The dreaded writers’ block is always around the corner and trying to force yourself to be productive can be a heavy burden to carry, especially when there are outside distractions.

Sharrock’s lecture has inspired me to post my own tips for being creative, the techniques that I use to cope with the creative demand.

• Forget about the task in hand. No, really – once you’ve thought about something for a long time, it can weigh on your mind. Forgetting about it by doing another activity helps you relax and often you’ll come up with the solution to the problem just like that.
• Just take a walk, or watch some television and you’ll be surprised how many times an idea will come to you when you least expect it.
• Keep a notepad by on your bedside table. During the time in between wake and sleep, our mind can often make spurious associations, some of which may be useful. Remember to write them down, though, as you’ll probably have forgotten it by the morning.
• Bounce ideas off people. Your family, work colleagues and other people in the same field as you – all may have something to contribute and bring in an outside factor you were initially blind to.

As a parting note, just remember that being creative is a process, and not always necessarily a product. And remember, it can take years to find a working technique that’s right for you. What are your personal methods?

EntreCard is a great way of improving traffic flow on your blog by leaving (or ‘dropping’) virtual ‘business cards’ on other participants’ blogs. By doing this, you earn credits which can be exchanged for advertising and promotion for your blog within the EntreCard network.

EntreCard got me 250 visitors in the first three days I used it. So how did I manage it? Here are some tips for effective use of EntreCard.

• Create a banner as the standard text links are largely unappealing. Take the time to construct your own custom banner ad (125 x 125px) to be striking and effectively depict your blog’s theme. Remember, this will represent your blog within the whole EntreCard network.
• Place your own EntreCard quite high up on your page. People surfing quickly will be able to swiftly drop their card and it makes your blog more appealing to potential advertisers.
• Download the Entrecard Toolbar for Firefox. With a fast computer, you can scroll through 300 blogs in around 1 and a half hours. The favourites feature also makes creating a droplist much easier.

Method

• Begin with blogs in your inbox, then move onto your droplist (favourites). These represent your core followers.
• Next, go through the newest blogs (All categories) as they are likely to have new, active droppers
• Then, scroll through the most popular blogs in your category, and finally the most popular in similar categories/all categories.

Purchasing ads

• As you build up credits, you will be able to advertise on the more popular blogs. Place an emphasis on blogs in your own category and advertise on both cheap and expensive blogs 50%-50%
• Alternatively, you can save up your credits to exchange them for real cash. See here for more details.
  

I find that, if a post is too long, people get bored and leave your site. I won’t give a specific word count, but bear in mind that web surfers have short attention spans:

The average visitor stays on any one website for 30 seconds.

It’s your job to suck them in, enticing them to stay longer than that average.

• Write a snappy opening paragraph. Try and sum up the content of the whole post in the first few sentences without giving away too much. If you’re struggling with this, try copying a broadsheet newspaper opinion column.

By their very nature they are geared towards the casual surfer as well as the regular subscriber. By this token, try to make use of the following techniques:

• Bullet point ‘em, emboldening a word or two.
• Do top ten lists. People are attracted to these for some reason.
• Make use of Bold and italics to emphasise points, but be careful not to overdo things. Don’t forget the old cheeky strikethrough, too! (<s>Strikethough text</s>)
• Use short paragraphs and images. This breaks up the text so it doesn’t overface the reader.

A theme by StyleShout and Dan Farrimond

Styleshout have some excellent Blogger themes at their website. One in particular that caught my eye was one named Underground. However I wasn’t too sure about the colour scheme – its grey and red industrial theme seemed a bit generic for my liking. So, I spent an afternoon modifying it to a white-on-black theme to use on one of my blogs.

• Download the Underground Black theme for Blogger (Right click > Save As)
  

How to install:

1. Download the theme from the link above.
2. Open up your blog’s control panel in Blogger.
3. Go to ‘layout’ and choose the ‘HTML’ tab.
4. Where prompted, select the file to upload from your hard drive. (You may need to delete some widgets in order for this to work.)
5. Modify as appropriate using the HTML editor. Create your own 600 x 60px banner and upload it using the layout editor.

And that’s it! Enjoy.