What's your favorite way of stimulating your creative juices? How do you inspire yourself?

I don't usually get up at 2 a.m. and work, but when work's creative it's more like play, so why not? Here's two good posts to read and then I'll tell you why these two writers, Sean D'Souza and John Jantsch, are actually dancing the Tango together…

1. How to Succeed at Content Marketing Even if Your Content Skills Suck by Sean D'Souza. Sean is guest posting over at Copyblogger and makes a great point of stressing regularity and reliability. He says your content writing skills can't get better if you're not writing often, and if readers don't hear from you with frequency, they'll just 'change the channel, and go elsewhere. You've got to publish, stay on target with your messages, and keep readers informed.
2. Are You Right Brain Dead? asks John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing. Small business professionals often get so wrapped up in running a business, using their left brains for managing, organizing, and getting things done, that they neglect to stimulate their creative brains. Right brain functioning is essential to customer service, product enhancements, and in general finding creative solutions.

   John says, "If, as a marketer, the creative side of your thinking gets shut down you can find it difficult to create engaging blog posts, elegant customer service solutions and innovative product enhancements."

So true. Here's what happens: It's Friday so you run around checking to see if your to-do lists are on track. You may even spend the weekend catching up with left over tasks.

Getting things done is so left-brain. And once that left-brain energy gets plugged in, it's hard to shut it down. While that's a good thing for task accomplishments, it's not the best way to stay creative and improve your writing skills. (And it's not as much fun, I think!)

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I'm talking about content marketing here. Not about copywriting for a landing sales page, although that might ultimately be where you want your readers to click through to. No, I'm going to tell you what I think are the 3 keys necessary in all your content marketing that precedes your sales copy.

This means writing content for your:

• Blog posts
• E-newsletter articles
• Emails to your list
• Twitter updates
• Other social networking site communications
• Comments on other people's blog posts
• Web pages
• Articles
• Speeches
• Podcasts, audio files
• Video casts
• Ebooks, special reports, white papers

If you think of other places where it's important that you write and publish content to market your business, let me know.

If you aren't writing sufficient content in multiple forms and places on the Web, then it will be that much harder for you to get enough traffic over to your sales pages where you convert them to real clients and customers. That's what content marketing does…

Each form has a different style, but here's what they all must have in common to qualify as great content that effectively markets your business and your products and services:

1. Unique, useful information that saves time, energy or money or in some way enriches the lives of your targeted readers. It doesn't have to be original or new. But it should be presented or positioned so that it's not ho-hum.

   It's not good enough to regurgitate what everyone else is saying. Readers want to know your own particular perspective. Tell them why this is important for them to read and learn.

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