Late last year, I had the wild-hair idea to create a year of prompts that I called the Content Excellence Challenge. We’ve had a year of these creativity and productivity challenges here on Copyblogger, and I think we’ve all arrived at a very special place. Spiritually, ecumenically, grammatically. The community has spent a year trying Read More…
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Category: Content Challenge
2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The November Prompts
It’s time again for our pair of Content Excellence prompts! All year, our community has been working with these each month to create better work, and to create more of it. This month’s prompts could potentially be swapped, because they’re both ways to do better work and more work. They go together like (dare I Read More…
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2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The October Prompts
Here are your content challenge prompts for October! Each month this year, we’ve offered our community a pair of prompts. One is designed to improve the creativity and quality of your content. The other is designed to help you get more of that great stuff done. Feel free to jump in this week with either Read More…
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2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The September Prompts
We’re moving toward the end of the year — and it can be easy to start going into “hunker down” mode instead of “growth” mode. But we still have four more months of 2017 left — and it’s definitely not too late to do something epic this year! This month’s prompts are designed to keep Read More…
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2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The August Prompts
Happy August! It’s time for our pair of prompts to make you more creative and more productive.
For those of you who haven’t joined us yet, each month in 2017 we’re providing a pair of prompts: one to make you more productive and one to improve your creativity or writing skill.
Feel free to try one prompt or both. You can join the fun anytime you like. And let us know about your experiences in the comments!
The August Productivity Prompt
This month’s prompt is inspired by Jessica Abel’s excellent book for creative souls, Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life.
I’m presenting the very start of her program here as a bit of a “hack,” but the strength of Abel’s book is that it isn’t a collection of hacks. It’s a smart, flexible, and comprehensive system that lets you make more progress on your creative work — including the kind that you don’t have a deadline for yet.
Our August productivity prompt is:
For the next week or 10 days, keep track of how you spend each hour of your day.
You’re not going to figure out your priorities (yet). You’re not going to decide what to attack during your most productive time (yet). You’re just going to make quick notes as you go through your day about how you’re spending your time.
Just like tracking what you eat or how much money you spend, tracking your time gives you a clarity you
2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The July Prompts
Happy July! Here are the Copyblogger Content Excellence prompts for this month.
For those of you who haven’t joined us yet, each month in 2017 we’re providing a pair of prompts: one to make you more productive and one to improve your creativity or writing skill.
Feel free to try one prompt or both. You can join the fun anytime you like. And let us know about your experiences in the comments!
The July Creativity Prompt
Create two new types of content
Producing content, like any creative work, has its own set of rhythms.
At first, you have to work really hard to make anything you’re proud of.
As you continue to put in the hours, stretch your creative boundaries, and focus on deliberate practice, you start to get pretty good. Maybe even very good.
Then … maybe you get a tiny bit bored. You quit putting so much time in, and the cycle starts to move in the other direction.
The way to keep improving lies in changing things up. Keep changing the game for yourself. Not because you’re chasing some illusory time when you’ll be “good enough,” but because it’s fun to keep pushing toward the next level.
To that end, this month, I suggest you try two content types that are new to you.
You can vary the medium (text, infographic, audio, video) or you can vary the structure (storytelling, teaching, analogy, review).
If you’re stuck for ideas, Stefanie put a post together about 16 different approaches for
2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The June Prompts
There’s something about June … maybe that it’s the sixth month, so you have that reminder that the year is half over. Or maybe it’s the June sunshine (at least in my hemisphere) that makes you want to be ultra productive so you can sneak out for a before-dinner walk.
In any event, I’m feeling rather conquer-the-worldish at the moment, and I hope you are, too. To help with that, here are our community prompts for June.
Each month in 2017, we’re giving you a pair of prompts — one to make you more productive and one to improve your creativity or writing skills.
You can jump in anytime — and let us know about your experiences in the comments!
The June Productivity Prompt
Weekly outreach
Last week I wrote a post about the two ugly problems that plague freelancers, especially when they’re starting out: the lack of clients and the lack of good clients.
One solution to these terrible woes is to put a marketing system into place — a regular, consistent process you follow to find more of what you want.
This could apply to …
potential clients
potential customers
potential blog readers
potential podcast listeners
… you get the idea.
Your productivity prompt for this month is to decide on a day of the week and a time. Maybe it’s Thursdays at 10:00 a.m.
Then, every Thursday at 10:00 a.m., do one outreach task. You might use June to experiment with tasks and find one that works for you.
What’s an outreach task?
2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The May Prompts
It’s May! Holy beans, the year’s nearly half over. I’m still wondering where March went, never mind April.
Here’s our pair of community prompts for this month. Each month in 2017, we’re giving you a pair of prompts — one to make you more productive, and one to improve your creativity or writing skill.
You can jump in anytime — and let us know about your experiences in the comments!
The May Productivity Prompt
Banish “Fine”
A few years back, I helped crowdfund a documentary called “I’m Fine, Thanks” about some folks who, in the words of one of the subjects, had “climbed the ladder, then realized it was against the wrong wall.”
We all have things in life that we dismiss as being “fine” when they aren’t fine at all. Career situations, personal situations, meaning-of-life situations.
This month, think about an important problem that you’ve squished down as being “fine.” Then spend 30 days taking some kind of action to move to something better.
They could be tiny actions or medium actions. Maybe there will be some huge actions in there as well. But if you do this, even if your actions every day are truly tiny, I predict you’ll find out two things:
Small actions create momentum surprisingly quickly.
The energy you spend trying not to think about what’s “fine” could be much better spent making something amazing.
Here are a few little motivational shoves to get you rolling:
My post on the power of small habits (lots more resource links there)
I’m Fine,
Your 2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The January Prompts
In case you missed our “warmup” last month, this is the official kickoff for our 2017 Content Excellence Challenge.
January resolutions are fine, but we’re more interested in helping you make consistent, ongoing improvement.
Every month, we’ll give you a pair of prompts that we can all work on together as a community.
The first prompt each month will be creative — prompts intended to improve your craft.
The second will be productive — prompts intended to improve your productivity.
We’d love to have you join us for every pair of prompts, but of course you’re always welcome to jump on and off the bus as you need to. All progress is good progress!
January’s creative prompt: Headlines
This month, we’re going to work on headlines.
Copyblogger has been known for advice about headlines from the beginning, and headlines continue to be a “Basic” that pays major dividends.
As we work together to create stronger and more powerful content this year, it just makes sense to give each piece the attention it deserves by pairing it with a solid headline.
Well-crafted headlines will get you more shares and traffic. They make it easier for more people to click through to your work. They can make a massive difference in the impact your content makes.
Your task:
Brainstorm 20 or 30 headlines for a significant piece of content you’re intending to create in the next few weeks. Try to incorporate as many ideas as you can from the resources below.
Resources:
Pick up our Magnetic Headlines ebook (it’s
Start Your Engines: The 2017 Content Excellence Challenge Begins Now
Well, 2016 is nearly behind us. Can I get a Hallelujah?
In the interest of wanting to build many excellent things in 2017, allow me to propose a plan.
I’d like us, as a community, to commit to a year of consistent improvement as writers and creative professionals, starting now and continuing through December next year.
We’ll get started this week with some easy and interesting warm-up work, before we head into the Tilt-A-Whirl of the winter holidays. Then in 2017, each month we’ll have a pair of “prompts” to work on … tactical, workable things we can do to make our content better.
One prompt will give you a creative technique to work on. (Today you also get a bonus creativity prompt.) The other prompt will focus on productive habits … so you can get more of your excellent content created and published.
Your content excellence prompts for December 2016
This month, feel free to focus on one prompt or noodle around with them all.
The first December prompt is “Values”
In other words, the ideas or themes that are important to you as a person — that give your life meaning.
Things like Fairness, Faith, or Freedom.
I’ve written about this exercise before, but it’s powerful (and backed by good research), and it’s simple enough to bear repeating.
The exercise is to write out a list of 5–10 values that matter to you. Keep this list somewhere handy, and look it over from time to time.
These don’t have to be