Looking backwards now, I can recall many fancy SEO changes during this past year. Spammy-poor quality tactics were eaten by monochromatic spontaneously popping-up-dates. Those who produced fatty fast-food shaped thin content became the lowest link on the food chain and the call to arms came along: produce great content, content is the king, text is the currency of the Internet.

The inconvenient truth confusion aired. – don’t spend money on aggressive search engine optimization -  Also did the rebuttal. – promotion of great content - Pretty please make sure you read both. Would you?

vía www.92pixels.com

What became clear is the need for generating great, shareable, engaging, outstanding content. Certainly the time came for discussion of the production process for doing so.

I’m tired of the excuses. You have three kinds of equity – time, talent, and money. Time/talent do not require money when put together.

— John Doherty (@dohertyjf) December 4, 2012

I align myself with this John Doherty post – Producing great content with no budget – and I would like to hone in on one of the three types of equity; Talent.

Usually talent is related or in reference to celebrities. In the SEO context,  talent means having a large dose of creativity. The production of genuinely great content is powered by creativity. And enhancing creativity is our choice. Being creative or finding creative thinking is not as hard as one might think – lets knock down the two main roadblocks that hinder ideas, creativity is not linked to intelligence and creative people are not entirely born that way.

Creativity is a learned behaviour, it’s the way you approach things, how you interact with circumstances, it’s a conjunction of points of view, it’s asking naive questions, it’s washing your eyes after each look. It’s merely actions, what you do instead of who you are.

That said lets check on 5 things you can do (oxymorononically) and that doesn’t mean taking performance-enhancing drugs:

1. Act naturally

Keep calm and act. We are used to perform automate actions without thinking, start thinking them. Use keys and open doors with a different hand, hold books with the other hand, use your phone with the other hand. Cycle to work, or walk, or run. It is about changing habits.

2. New Classic

Write it down. Start writing more and use pen and paper. Sometimes writing your comments or thoughts down would let you approach things from a different angle. Keep a pen and notebook always close to you.

3. Political Science

As SEO’s we often need to interact with other departments, clients and people. Making our point  or making ourselves understandable might sometimes be difficult. Try connecting ideas to create new insights. Find a better way to explain things that everybody can easily understand.

4. Minor Crisis

Take a cat nap.

5. Modern Conservative

Rain makes everything better. Play with rain, walk under it, go for a run, look at it, rain completely shapes our common environment. (Better to do it in summer though)

Bonus: 6. Original Copy

Copy, we are all surrounded by really creative people. Observe them, how they act, how they interact, ask them and try some of the things they do.

These are just some of the few things I do on my regular basis or at least I try to do, however it is not for me to judge how creative I am. Please note it is your turn to write down which other activities you practice.