I
think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering
tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of
creativity, and they can be shaped by their user. -- Bill Gates
Creativity is a very
general and a diverse subject. In the artistic part of creativity, life can be
very interesting.
In this chapter, we
shall discuss creativity, the process behind it, why it is very important, and
apply it to the website building business.
This chapter discusses
the philosophy and psychology behind creativity and uses the idea to arrive at
a mastering point where creativity is elevated to charismatic authority as
discussed in the previous chapters.
When we are able to build
websites with such perception, instinct and awareness, we will be able to build
what is called viral websites.
Creativity is a dynamic
subject and involves not just rules but original ideas that should be
discovered.
This imagination should
be between the object we are creating and the procedures we are using to create
that object.
The connection between ourselves
and the object must be one. Metaphorically, we must be that thing we are
creating. Be it a website, a product or a service.
With the language of
creativity, the object we seek to create must speak our language.
This objects must
mirror our image.
Some of the general examples
of creative products are enhancing technology to discover new ideas and
objects. Another types are expressing our talents in the form of music,
beautiful paintings, play, drama or great movies, but in this chapter , we are focusing on the act of using creativity to
build and modify websites.
In fact, there are so
many beautiful and creative websites out there in the World Wide Web. A higher
level of creativity contributes a greater part of online conversion rate.
And an online
conversion rate is a faster way to use copywriter techniques to increase revenues
online.
A site with a higher
creative process is regarded very professional and respected. A well creative
site get more visitors and sells things easy. People turn to like such websites
and spend most of their time there.
Such websites have a tendency
to reach thousands of visitors and even millions.
To be able to come out
with such websites, we must create a website that enchants and challenges
people to meet their desires and wishes.
And the best approach
is to use creativity.
The idea was to help
students pick classes based on who else was taking them.
You could click on a
course to see who was signed up, or click on a person to see the courses he or
she was taking.
If a cute girl sat next
to you in Topology, you could look up next semester’s Differential Geometry
course to see if she had enrolled in that as well, or you could just look under
her name for the courses she had enrolled in.
Hundreds of students
immediately began using Course Match.
The status-conscious
students of Harvard felt very differently about a class depending on who was in
it. Zuckerberg had written a program they wanted to use.
As Mark Zuckerberg
stated himself “You could link to people
through things”.
Mark thought deeply
about how people like to connect to each other through things and used this
idea to create a related web program.
The most important
aspect of creativity is directing your talents to what people want or in need
or might use extensively.
Talent must satisfy the
society with good benefits and improves their lives through efficiency,
satisfaction and fulfillments
.
That is what Mark
Zuckerberg did. Mark furthered his idea by creating another program with the
same goal of connecting people called facemash.
Its purpose: figure out
who was the hottest person on campus. And create a process to rate them. As their
rating got hotter, their picture would be compared to hotter and hotter people.
Facemash wasn’t
successful but mark didn’t give up. His next project, facebook, became a
masterpiece and as am writing this book, connects to more than 1 billion users
worldwide.
This story signifies
how small ideas if modified and upgraded with creative mechanisms can turn to change
people’s lives.
We shall look at the
importance of using creativity to connect people directly or indirectly through
our websites.
And then focus on using
our natural talents and using creative processes to upgrade, modify and master our
websites.
Generally, the basic
definition of creativity is based on the phenomenon where something new and
valuable is formed.
To be able to
manufacture our creative process well through the building of websites, we must
understand how to visualize every single object we create and innovate.
We must identify
whether the item we create online is either tangible or intangible.
Then we will use
creativity to originally bring up an idea that will make our website unique to
other competitors.
Tangible items directed
to website building during creativity can be a new product invention, or a review
of products online.
As we discussed in the
pheromone trick chapter. By using creativity, we can produce a unique product
or services which will be directed to solve problems in our markets.
We can then use the
fetched emails from our subscribers to send our visitors our creative products.
Intangible items
directed to website building can be an idea, a scientific theory, music, digital
artwork, software or digital products like EBooks, novels and videos or movies.
However, the most
important thing is how we present these products, services or information to
the users through articles, posts, mail messages and media presentations.
Most of the time, when
we are the original inventors of these items, our goal is to continue to modify
these tangible or intangible items with creative modification processes.
But if we are building
upon other original ideas and items, then we must find an efficient way to make
this items be positioned in a way on the website so their core values will be
established.
The best process is to
build other original online components or ideas to further create another
creative line of items causing a chain of originalities.
After all, every
original idea comes from another original idea.
So we are going to look
at the creative modification process and use it to revolutionize our
creativity. But before that, let me elaborate on a person’s supposed state of
mind in the realms of creativity.
I created this cycle
through years of experience and research when building websites.
I found out this same creative
process can be employed to any other project at hand.
Before we start our
journey of creativity, we must identify our unique talent.
Our talent must be
recognized because that awareness alone will stand us to a point or stage of
competence. Talent is the first step to creativity.
The following diagram
shows the whole creative process which is also a cycle.
The cycle starts from the
following list:
1.
Talent awareness
2.
Problem Research
3.
Competence
Preparation
4.
Solution
Research
5.
Solution
completion
6.
Braintrust
Review and then to 2. Problem research again.
The cycle continues to
problem research again with iterations of cycle upon cycle until perfection is
achieved.
1. Talent Awareness
If you find any of the
above synonyms in common with a particular hobby, then you are talented. Nevertheless,
there is still much to be done after discovering our talent.
The most important part
is knowing what we are most talented with.
And to be at top performance
in that area. To be able to reach this goal the best approach is to reach a
higher level of self-awareness.
Self-awareness is
knowing what we are good at and what we are not good at. It is also knowing our
main purpose being alive.
This is very crucial in
the authority spider technique because knowing our purpose and staying focus to
it will make us perfect through the creative process cycle.
We should be able to
know how best we use complex problem-solving skills, creativity, empathy,
big-picture thinking, competitiveness, and attention to detail, organizational
thinking, persistence and a host of other cognitive abilities towards our
talent.
We should be
significantly authentic and try to develop our interested skills until we are
experts.
Authenticity means
filling a role that is true to who we are, not spending all of our time trying
to develop new natural talents.
The reason this is so
important is because according to everything we know about how the human mind
works, we can’t develop new thinking talents once the first familiar ones are
embedded and becomes our hobby.
With regards to
building websites, finding our talent through the building of website is when we
identify the best and suitable market that we are familiar with and building product
review sites, product affiliate sites or blogging about our talent.
If we choose to build
websites about specific subjects in society like, entertainments, games,
movies, or interested subjects that are not related to tangible products, we
should make sure the subject chosen are related to what we love and that we
have a deeper interest.
This will build strong
relationship with our readers and they will regard us as experts.
One may then ask, what
if I don’t know my talent. Well I normally tend to use social approach to find
out what peoples talent are.
We can do this by
asking our friends what they really like about us. We can ask family members,
parents, siblings and love loves.
The reflection of
ourselves are always portrayed by what people say about us. However, we should
also compare what people say about us to justify our thoughts whether they are
true or not.
Then we can make a
decision about our great talents. And when these comments from our friends and
loved ones turn out to be negative, we must check our life diligently whether
they are true.
2. Problem Research
In other to outshine
our talent productively, we must use problem research skills to expose tangible
or intangible problems.
Problem research is one
of the key steps toward finding interested niches or markets.
With our talent in mind,
we follow our talent by first searching online for products or information that
are related to our talent.
We then use problem research
skills to find current problems in the market.
Example story:
Augustus, our imaginary character found out he used to be a great artist since
infancy. But he lost pleasure in it while growing up.
However, he knows he is
still an extraordinary pencil artist. Augustus decided to build a website based
on his talent.
Therefore since he is
aware of his talent, the second step was to use problem research to find
similar problems facing the pencil art industry and build a site around it.
With this idea in his
mind, he got a great market and niche. But he needed to use online problem
research skills.
He used the following
strategies to find these problems.
·
First he decided
to find online forums that were related to his chosen talent and were been
discussed like the issues of pencil arts.
·
He also decided
to find the top pencil artists online, what they were doing and the problems
they were going through.
·
He also decided
to check the comments people were making on the top websites relating to pencil
arts, video sites comments and facebook comments about the top artists in this
sector.
“NOTE: When using problem research skills to find
typical problems within a specific market, one thing to keep in mind is to identify
the current problems worrying the market”
Augustus decided to use
the following online research skills to find the current problems. Because his
market resides in the pencil art market, he decided to use the following
keywords on the Google search engine.
·
“inlink: forum
pencil art how to”
·
“intitle: forum
pencil art problems”
·
“intext:
problems in pencil art”
·
“intext: reply
website comment pencil art problems”
NOTE: The colon after the inlink or intext keyword
is a technique that is only understood by the Google search engine as a
separator between the main keywords after the colon and the operator keywords
before the colon. This technique are normally used by most S.EO and online
marketing savvies to find specific keywords. In chapter 17, we shall examine
all the online keyword techniques.
What Augustus did was
to use the above keyword techniques to target pages or forums in websites that
were related to pencil art.
With the keyword “inlink:” he wanted to find the articles
or posts in forums that had been linked through other websites with a link of
the keyword after the colon.
The keyword “intitle:” finds websites forums with
the title “pencil art problems”.
“intext:” was
used to find website pages with the text “problems
in pencil art”.
So based on the above
keyword techniques Augustus used, he was able to find forums and pages and even
online comments about the current problems facing the pencil art industry.
The following shows
some of the search engine results pages from the above keywords.
With the “inlink: forum pencil art how to”, he
found out pencils.com published a post about the top drawing websites every
artist should follow.
He was able to find
those websites, what they were doing, their targeted markets, the strength of
the competition and other technical stuffs like how those sites where
monetizing and decided to jot down some important ideas and problems or
mistakes those pages were making.
So with all the above
search keywords, Augustus was able to identify the current problems in the
pencil art market.
Therefore anyone can
use the same above keyword techniques against their market and talent and come
out with a research problem.
Once the research
problem is identified, then competence preparation step will be ignited.
3. Competence Preparation
It is the level that
makes us use the problem at hand to build strong and competent resources to
reach a level of proficiency.
Sometimes, when we find
the current problems concerning a research, most of the time, a renowned
solution may be implemented already by another competitor.
So the question to ask
is: is the current solution in the market sufficient or adequate? Another
analogical question is: Even though gold passes through fire and stood the test
of time, why is diamond valued more?
Is it because diamond
is unique in its form and original? Is it because diamond is much more expensive
and is scarcer than gold?
What if we create a
solution that is unique and original and much more regarded as valuable than
other solutions from our competitors?
Neil Partel and Brian
Clark repeated this strategy by creating unique products that targeted the
needs of their subscribers.
Are some creative ideas
more valuable than others? If so, how can we achieve such value? Why do some
creative ideas stand the test of time than others?
Competence preparation
aims at training anyone to rise to the occasion with a solution to a research
problem.
It also challenges the
mind to device a great strategy to be in the league of excellent leaders in the
market.
It is the level where
we sit back, gather our thoughts, and take a bird’s eye view of the whole said
problem.
Then we device other
variables in the equation, try and test with our skills to create room for
improvement.
It is when we weigh
ourselves with our talent to see whether we are eligible and qualified to
tackle the situation at hand.
And at the end of the
preparation, we decide whether to learn and train ourselves to reach that
maximum capacity in that market.
But at times, the time
needed to reach that maximum capacity may be limited especially when there is
serious competition and a dead line.
And sometimes, it may
not be time but other resources like cash or connections that may limit us.
And in this situation,
the best approach will be to both sharpen our talent and use the pheromone
trick to reach a level of mastery as we discussed in chapter 7, “the psychology of building authoritywebsites”.
Example is in the
course of building websites, we may come across other competitors also tackling
the same market and issue at the same time.
And in this approach,
the best strategy is to use intuition like speed to tackle the said problem
with our talent before we later modify them with more research and competitive skills.
And most of time,
throughout my experience, sometimes the best approach is to device a strong and
blood sweat unchallenged solution to the problem at hand.
Competence preparation
is finding out whether we have the capacity, the knowledge and the skills to
tackle the research problem.
We shall continue with
the story about Augustus.
Let us find out how
Augustus was able to use competence preparation to arrive at his decision.
Whether he will use
speed and intuition to tackle the said problem or he will use another training
and preparation to reach the skills needed for the market competition.
Because Augustus
recognizes art to be his natural talent, he has decided to tap into the market
of the artist. As in painting, pencil art and other forms of art.
However, to his dismay,
he found out he had been left behind from new and excellent artist dominating
the internet with great articles, pictures and even live videos of them
painting or shading which had attracted thousands of visitors on YouTube and
even millions at times.
Augustus became aware
that if he was going to compete with such market, he had to do something unexpected
and astonishing. He had to develop a pheromone
trick to this market. He had to sharpen his art skills if he was going to
produce his own works. And he even had to decide the type of product or service
he was going to choose as monetization for his website.
So the following were
the competence preparation steps Augustus used which anyone can adapt.
Competence Preparation Steps:
1.
Study the
current selling product and services in the chosen market.
2.
Study the
methods of competitors or top icons dominating the chosen market.
3.
Study the
current level of skills in the competition and how fast those skills can be
learnt.
4.
Study and
brainstorm any alternative original product or services solution that can be
brought to the market to help solve the problem?
Note: When you are able to come out with the answers
and processes to the above steps then you have prepared yourself competently to
your chosen market.
So throughout his
research online as showed previously, Augustus found some top and current great
pencil artist online.
He found out how much
each sold their piece, their style and nature of their market. The following
exhibit some of his findings:
From his research to
find the top pencil artist online, he found a post from creativebloq.com
about the top 10 pencil artist currently.
The post listed names
like Paul Cadden’s pencil work
called shower, the 19 year old female artist from Netherland called Rajacenna who shaded the “You are not
alone piece”, Dirk Dzimirsky’s
piece called Frozen and more which can
be found on the creativebloq website.
Augustus was much more
trilled and also competitively frightened when he saw the realist and rational
type of art works being portrayed since his art talent abandonment.
He saw these artists
demonstrate flair, mastery and propensity of talent that was beyond genius.
He knew such great
masterpieces could be executed but was trilled and even shaken to find such
display of talent to it maximum capacity. Even though he knew he was good with
pencil art, these artist were flawless and spectacular, they executed a sense
of mastery that was beyond the understanding of the non-artist.
Paul Cadden’s shower
displayed excellent wizardry in patience, observance and detailed emergence of
natural realism with pencil and charcoal.
And then the 19 year
old Rajacenna as well as Dirk’s Frozen.
Augustus knew if he was
also going to bring out his talent to face these competitors, then he had to
come out with an extraordinary approach.
A radical but
competitive alternative edge and strategy.
And as he knew he was
at the creative stage of competence preparation, he had to weigh both choices,
whether he was going to stick to coming out with similar works or whether he
could challenge himself to do so.
Or whether he was going
to use the pheromone trick to take these top artist, blog about them in his
site and use the opportunity to come out with an idea that will be targeted to
the audience of these great artist.
After weighing both
strategies, he concluded if he was going to gain trust and reputation from the
art market who were normally collectors, buyers, upcoming artist and
professionals, he had to also create his own art piece.
And then also to add
the second choice, going for the pheromone trick that is blogging about these
great artists and winning their followers.
So he was going to
demonstrate Charismatic Authority by creating artworks, show video recordings
online about the art processes he used to complete his work and showcase his
works online.
Then he was going to
find a way to create a product that will target the collectors, the artist and
the learners.
So his conclusion at
the level of competence preparation was:
1.
Create about 10
artworks from his heart onto the website to show his integrity as an artist.
2.
Blog about some
of the top pencil artist in the world.
3.
Come out with a
unique online product or service which will target potential subscribers to his
new website.
Note:
The same above approach can be directed
to any market we choose when working on competence preparation. First we study
the top dominators in the market.
We weigh ourselves whether we can reach their level.
If not we adapt by using the pheromone trick to mimic their style and we infuse
it with our unique talent or solution which is also a product or services to
the subscribers.
4. Solution Research
We are now ready to
reach the second level of our creative process cycle: solution research.
Solution research is
the method used to find the solutions to the competent ideas we discover in competent
preparation.
We find solutions on
how to actualize and materialize the ideas we discover in competent
preparation.
Solution research is
also finding possible and potential obstacles which may appear as we build our
solution.
It is a research which
aims at preparing the stage and platform so our solution will come to live.
This preparation is
very necessary because it creates an effective and potent step by step
processes to our solution.
We shall continue our
story about how Augustus was able to use solution research to find possible or
potential obstacles to reach his competent level, product functioning level or
services functioning level.
The following are the
steps to take in other to conduct our solution research:
1.
List down your
competent preparation ideas you have already created.
2.
List down the
potential obstacles and problems which may hinder the competent preparation
ideas you listed at number 1.
3.
List down how
you are going to solve these obstacles and set a timeframe to complete.
So let us continue our
story. As we know, Augustus listed down the ideas in the competent preparation
level.
1.
Listing the competent preparation ideas:
·
Create about 10
artworks from his heart onto the website to show his integrity as an artist.
·
Blog about some
of the top pencil artist in the world.
·
Come out with a
unique online product or service which will target potential subscribers to his
new website.
2.
Potential Obstacles to the above ideas:
·
How fast he
could come out with artworks which could dominate the market and reach the
expectation levels of other artists and collectors as well as art critics.
·
With blogging about
the top pencil artists in the world, he found out most articles and posts where
dominating the pencil art niche. They displayed top artists and showcased their
works. He found out these were websites with great Domain Authority and Page
Authority. They were also huge sites with massive daily visitors.
·
With the idea about
coming out with a unique product or service to his target potential subscribers,
first he knew he had to create a unique product or service to the visitors who
were in the art learning niche, art collectors niche or the artist niche.
If he was going to produce a product or
service for the art learning niche, it had to be a product that solve current
problems in the market.
3.
List down how the proposed solutions are going to be
solved and their timeframe.
·
With the problem
of coming out fast with his first 10 great pencil artworks to compete with what
is at the market.
He decided to draft a timeframe to
control how he was going to finish his artworks.
And this timeframe has to be backed with
a time management system as discussed earlier in chapter 6 “Goals, Task and Time”.
·
With the
solution to competing with top bloggers in this niche, he knew if he was going
to blog in this niche, he had to come out with a strategy that will be unique
and valuable than what is at the market.
And he had to use search engine
optimization skills to find advantage keywords to this niche and come out with
create articles to get immediate subscribers.
We
shall talk more of keyword S.E.O skills in chapter 19.
He also saw that, if he was going to
dominate this market, then he had to learn all the art of building a great
website.
He had to learn what all the top website
builders and bloggers are doing, the tools, techniques and everything there was
to find to reach his goal.
(Note:
From the next chapter, will shall go through all the guides in other to build
our website to reach the maximum value needed.)
·
With the
solution to finding either a great product or services to the art market, he
decided to create a service. He decided to create a service in his website
which will help collectors, artist and visitor bid on artworks based on their
rating online. And since he is a programmer, he decided to launch an online art
bidding platform.
6. Solution Completion
Solution completion is
the most difficult and yet the most important step. It is the time we set up
our environment to suit us to complete our solution.
It is the step at which
we start using the advice from chapter 5 “focus”
and chapter 6 “Goals, Task and Time”
to help us complete our solution.
Using the techniques of
focus is very important because without it, we may get stuck at a point when
the competition because intense or the motivation to work dissipates a little.
