SHOULD I RENAME THIS BLOG? Artists & writers, musicians & digital artists, photographers, painters, sculptors, performing artists – I NEED YOUR HELP.
10 Comments Published by Andrew Leigh November 26th, 2008 in Blog Announcements.| Creative Development for Artists, Writers and all Artistic Creativity |
Now don’t get me wrong, I love the name of this blog. The trouble is the search engines don’t. It’s not literal enough for them, and that word creative causes all sorts of online problems because of the I.T. company of the same name.
I’d be truly grateful if you would read this post and gift me your opinions in the comments section – even if you are echoing previous comments.
Finding the Right People
So here’s the challenge – this blog is all about offering personal development insights to a broad spectrum of artistic people – tools of mental attitude and practical effectiveness to help artists of all kinds enhance both artistic output and the quality of their work.
I have previously used the words creative and creativity because whether you are a writer, poet, painter, musician� well – they seemed like a good common denominator, a uniting factor that pulled together the often disparate artistic communities.
I realise now that these words aren’t doing the jobs I need them to.
- They aren’t helping enough of the right people to find and grow the blog
- They are not ‘product friendly’ in terms of adding the right commercial resources to the blog.
That second point is just as important as the first. I do need some income flow from the blog if I am to continue offering the free content I hope will always remain at its core.
The Key Word Challenge
If my target audience was more tightly defined I guess it would be easier – if I were talking just to visual artists, or just to writers, for instance.
But I really don’t want to narrow my audience if I can avoid it.
So the big challenge is to keep offering the personal development content and offer it in such a way that people from all artistic backgrounds feel included.
Are phrases like artistic community and artistic people as inclusive as creative community and creative people?
If I want to address the wider group of creative people I’ve talked about – what words and phrases work for you?
I’m assuming here that I am right to be inclusive in this way – that personal development techniques for, say, painters, are also relevant to poets, digital artists and conceptual artists. Am I right in that assumption?
I really do need your help and feedback about this – so please do take the time to have your say.
- Am I right in keeping my artistic audience as broad and inclusive as possible?
- If so, what are the umbrella words and phrases that work for you?
Please help me take The Creative Instinct to the next stage by responding to this post.
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Hi Andy,
Glad you have set yourself a challenge !
Off the top suggestions :
1) What are “product friendly” words ? I believe its somehow possible to find a list of the most “popular” web names/latest trends (Google has its own list ?). Find these words and see if any resonate with you.
2) Personally, I’m a bit turned off these days with “personal development” and find myself wanting to avoid anything overtly called such, like the plague !
3) I liked Creative Instinct because to me it implied each individual has the potential to be creative, and an inherent “instinct” which maybe needs to be uncovered.
4) a long time ago I was recommended to read “Covert Hypnosis” by Kevin Hogan – in it is a list of 150 of the most “attention commanding words” in the english language, and which are used to sell and write – some which might be relevant are :
Discover, Effective, Energy, Exceptional, Exciting, How to. Introducing, Irresistible, New, Overcome, Power(ful), Realize, Results, Remarkable, Surprising, The Truth About..,Unlimited, Valuable.
How about incorporating some of these – especially if they coincide with 1) above. A “double-whammy” ?
5) The sorts of umbrella words or phrases that work for me are :
Celebrate Your Creative Self
Paint Red Hot Landscapes That Sell
A Proven Strategy for Creating Great Art
Being Bold with Watercolour
Living Juicy – Daily Morsels for the Creative Soul
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
The Artists Way / Vein of Gold
(all the above are existing books!)
Success Unlimited (web-site)
In summary it seems the types of words that appeal to me are those that imply either an element of risk, or an element of crazy, quirky creativity, and possibly most important, fun.
6) I think you are right to keep your audience as broad and inclusive as possible.
Hope some of this helps,
Very Best
Victoria
Thanks Victoria
Some useful stuff there for me to think about. Thank you for taking the time to answer. I’ve been thinking about this most of the day and I’m already having second thoughts about changing the name of the blog.
All I mean by product friendly is that if I put google ads on the site, for instance, it will bring up adverts that are relevant and useful to the blog’s audience. I’m not looking to design the content to sell stuff, but I do need to use words that will help people find me better and get the right adverts.
I take your point too, about the term ‘personal development’, but it does accurately describe the thrust of the site and it is something everyone understands. I’ll have to give that a bit more thought too.
The list of titles is useful too, thanks, and I have already recognised that I need to work on making my titles more appealing.
Really useful – thank you.
Hi Andy!
Long time – I still check in with your blog as it is on my FeedDemon page. I actually like the creative title as it seems more inclusive than “artistic”. In other words people might feel there is scope for creativity in all walks of life rather than purely artistic endeavours. Of course, if you are seeking readers who are artists that cuts the other way!
I think creativity is something about which many of us have serious head trash (american/Sandler sales terms for limiting beliefs) in that we don’t think of ourselves that way. Addressing this in the title, as you do now is useful I think.
However there may be ways to get better search engine rankings than by changing the name. I assume you have a web guy? They can usually recommend what black magic is appropriate.
I know it doesn’t apply in blighty but since I have now gone native in the USA – Happy Thanksgiving!
Jerry
Hi Jerry
Good to hear from you. Hope all’s well in Kansas. You’re right, I originally chose ‘creative’ over ‘artistic’ because it felt more inclusive. I guess with your own love of dance you’d have a good perspective on that.
I’m definitely keeping the name now – I just need to be cleverer with other key-words.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and all in the US.
Hi Andrew
It’s always difficult to get the pitch right, but I agree with Victoria that there are some frequent ‘hits’ on google and in the top set is ART which, from what I gather when searching, is a pretty generic term for all things creative but may not be instantly linked to poets and writers. So personally I think you have it right with Creative.
The Artists Way by Julia Cameron is a book all about unlocking or helping develop your creativity and she is a writer, so has written this book with writers and poets in mind – to help rid them of writers block. It is now widely used for all creative disciplines and has been quite successful, from what I know.
I find it interesting that she has named the Book The Artists way, when it was primarily written for writers, and I think it shows the power of words and how they are perceived . Had she called it the Writers way – it would not be so popular and would not have made the leap to all creative people.
But then I come back to the fact that we are all CREATIVE and that can be so widely acceptable too.
Perhaps a change to “Creative Development” may be a good way to go and if someone is looking for personal development in the arts that is possibly what they would search for.
I hope my waffle is of some help.
Vix
Fabulous feedback and advice, Vix.
That’s really helped me. For some strange reason I’ve never thought of the term ‘creative development’. I love it! Thanks so much for offering it, and for the contextualisation too – very useful in helping me shape my thinking.
I clearly needed some other perspectives here, and your response, along with Victoria and Jerry has given me just what I was looking for.
Hi Andy
it’s been far too long since I was last in touch (2006!) so apologies – I do read all your blogs though
Now you have probably already made up your mind to retain the Creative Instinct name and in my opinion that is entirely the right thing to do. It’s a cracking title as it is all encompassing and “speaks” to a wider audience than say – Artists Corner (which conjures up an image of a group of painters huddled together in a dark and smokey room!). It’s already been mentioned but you really only need to look at the SEO of the site and improve on your metadata and keywords as these are the things that search engines, well, search! You can pay someone to do this (google for ‘em) or do it yourself – play around on Google by inputting words you think may be appropriate to your sites content and see what comes up.
Keep writing and I promise to keep reading.
Laura
Hi Laura
Great to hear from you and thanks for your feedback. Metadata – that’s something else I need to look at too. Strange, I’ve got that sorted on my coaching site but for some reason it’s passed my by on this blog.
I think this post has been great for me. It’s really helped focus my mind on what needs doing and I’m feeling much more energised to do it.
Onwards and upwards – Andy
Hello Andrew – I stumbled across your blog via Google Alerts – I get an email which tells me if there are any sites with the phrase “Nether Edge” in it – and hence I came across you (and not for the first time).
To get the people coming to your site that you want – you need to be looking at your content and write for the web. Identify what your key phrases and words are that identify the people you want to attract and work those words and phrases in to your content – that way search engines will pick up on those words and offer up your pages over someone else’s. Have a look at http://www.nickusborne.com/ also try out a product (for free) called Word Tracker (Google has something similar) where you type in a key word or yours and it offers alternatives to cover your bases.
On a general point you need to take advantage of your page title (the bit in the blue bar) “The Creative Instinct” and add to it – e.g. “The Creative Instinct – thoughts, advice, musings and inspiration for photographers, artists, etc….” as Google looks at this – so the more you can add to that that relates to the content of your site the better.
Finally – linking – encourage people to link to you (even do a link swap with other bloggers) – the more links that point at you the more Google will rank your page as being relevant to the appropriate search.
I hope this helps and that I haven’t been telling you how to suck eggs.
One thing to note on using Google Adwords – you might see that as a result of your “Frying Pan Article” your ads are now showing cookery products! Try Amazon Associates – you can build the ads as you see fit and if there is a specific book or product that you think fits with your site – build an advert for it via Amazon.
I hope you are well.
Take care,
Alastair
Hi Alastair
Thanks for the advice and no – it’s not telling me how to suck eggs. Although I do ‘know’ most of the stuff you’ve mentioned I’ve only just started really focussing on it. There are various reasons for that, some of them described on this blog. Anyhow, I think that though I ‘know’ it I haven’t yet come to own that knowledge, if you know what I mean. It’s not been internalised and fully understood because I haven’t put it into practice.
The advice you’ve given me, and that of everyone else is really helping me to get to grips with what needs to be done. I’m immensely grateful to you all.
With respect to my ‘frying pan article’ (which if you’ve not read it, wasn’t actually about fp’s), yes that’s given me some fun over the last few days. An awful lot of learning for me there – and an increase in swearing in the Leigh household!
Watch this space as I slowly but surely put all the brilliant advice into practice over the next few weeks.
Your help is very much appreciated Alastair & maybe I’ll see you at the Farmers’ market.
Andy