The more you know about your content creator style, the better you can harness your natural talents. It’ll also help you to warm towards and develop the things that you enjoy (and offload the parts you don’t).
And if you ask for help with content creation, don’t think that it will necessarily diminish your personal message or tone of voice. The right creative partner won’t dampen your individuality, they’ll help it to shine.
But more on that later.
For now, what does your content creator style say about you?
1. The all guns blazing type
You know where your starting point is but where you’ll end up, nobody knows. This approach is fun, can kick up some novel ideas and it’s a great way to unleash the soul’s creativity but it can leave you flailing around, a little unsure of your purpose.
Before long, your energy wanes and you run out of steam five miles from town (probably without a drink or a snack).
Try – supporting your ideas with context. Don’t see strategy as a muzzle on your ingenuity - see it as a structure on which to hang it. That way, what you produce can fit together into a bigger picture and you never know, it may inspire further ideas.
2. The reading all the stuff and then filing a notebook type
One rabbit hole leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another. Next time you raise your head and look around you’re ten feet underground and you have no idea how to get out.
Your project gets shelved because it’s too complicated to make sense of. You have a sneaky suspicion that you have material for several posts if only you could untangle it all.
Try – mind-mapping. I’m a huge fan of an A3 sheet and coloured pens. Draw circles around ideas, and arrows to connect them and then decide an order in which you’d like to make your points so that they flow. The important thing is to limit yourself to one or two smart ideas, saving the others to bake at another time.
3. The master of the soliloquy
It doesn’t take much to spark an idea. Fan the flame and you’re ablaze, able to talk your ideas into existence. Feeling bright incendiaries in your brain, the concepts and opinions tumble from your mouth.
Trouble sets in when you try to record or organise them in some way. Getting ideas down onto the screen or even onto paper seems to inhibit the process.
Try – recording yourself. If you cringe at the thought of listening to your own voice, set yourself the challenge of going beyond what you hear to pick out the main points of what you're saying. Pretend you're listening to someone else's podcast. Better still, start a podcast - or if you've already got one, repurpose your ideas into a blog post. Don't waste anything.
4. The magpie
Memes are your thing and you revel in parody. Collecting the shiny ideas of the world, you have creators and writers you come back to time and again but sometimes you find a new gem and then you’re obsessed with them for a while.
It can be difficult to know where their voice ends and yours begins. The temptation is to be so absorbed with their brilliance, message and unique ideas that you forget your own light is just as illuminating.
Try – seeing the magic in the space where your thoughts and their thoughts intersect because that’s where the genius is. Establish your value, thoughts and authenticity by coming up with the connections no one else has conjured up yet. Then embellish them.
5. The incorrigible perfectionist
Trying to muster first-draft creativity with final-draft energy, you stifle the process by clearing up as you go. It keeps things tidy but you can’t help wondering whether you could stretch your ideas further, allowing your inner voice to speak up.
If you’ve been through the school system, you’ll have at least one horror story to tell of the mess a devilish red pen can make to a piece of self-expression.
Try – the ‘write drunk, edit sober’ approach. Of course, there is no evidence that getting tipsy is advantageous (or even desirable) while writing or that Hemingway even uttered these often-quoted words but what I do know is that one of the greatest impediments to expression is the fear that someone is looking over your shoulder. Get the draft out in a non-judgemental frame of mind and then come back later with a fresh pair of eyes. Don’t worry, the fiendish red pen has been banished...
...and in its place the calm tones of Grammarly.
How to make the most of your style
We’re all wired differently and by tweaking what we do, we can unleash more of our individual conjury. That’s when we shine and we build the greatest connections with our audience.
Whether your love and talent is in rabbiting out new ideas or getting stuck in with wild abandon think about what you’d like to concentrate on and what you might be able to delegate. If you’ve a heavy social media schedule to stick to, consider getting a VA onboard or a designer to get done in a flash which would take you all day.
What's content co-creation?
I’m a copywriter by name but these days I’m more of a content co-creator. It involves listening to and shaping my clients’ ideas into things like thought leadership articles, social media posts and podcast notes. They’ll find interesting news snippets on their travels and fire them into my inbox, or book a session to talk through their ideas until we develop a piece that makes them happy.
You can’t do everything, so if there’s some part of the creative process you’re not comfortable with, let’s have a chat. My purpose is to make sure the people who need your energy and healing spirit find it, which is why content co-creation is the perfect solution.