Twisting ideas to promote your client
By now, if you have been reading my posts, you will have gathered that I am not a so-called "creative writer". I do not produce literature. I have no burning desire to write a novel, unless it's guaranteed to be a bestseller ,which will keep me in the style to which I sincerely wish to become accustomed. I am a commercial animal, I write for pay and I look at writing as a means to earn my living and to form the bedrock of a business I am building.
That said, it does not mean that I am not imaginative nor creative with the ideas that flow and am used to delivering work products for my clients. It certainly does not follow that I am in any way less passionate about what I am doing, while I also have a fierce pride in my work, and delivering the very best I can provide for clients. Some of my work is "mindless pap" as I often say to enquiring friends and family and in my honest opinion it is just that - advertising and promotional rubbish. Nevertheless, it is good advertising rubbish and I can say that because it performs the task that my clients wish to achieve and I get paid for producing it.
Today, my work for the most part is not "mindless pap" as my clients and the projects have become more interesting. Writing assignments has started to exercise my mind and imagination to a greater extent, than figuring out how to get 800 words on a paper dealing with Japanese "Geta" shoes, or producing a dumbed down series of articles on alternatives to Viagara. Even when you are confronted with a topic that readily lends itself to a simple churning out of some more advertising rubbish you can exercise your imagination and tackle the subject from a different perspective. I firmly believe that the confidence I have acquired in two years of commercial writing has encouraged me to take alternative approaches to handling a client topic.
Earlier this week I had to write a series of blog posts for a site called Your Health Reporter which promotes altenative therapies, amongst which is the use of a slimming pill derived from a cactus in the Kalahari Desert, Hoodia Gordonii. Your Health Reporter, is a relatively new client for me and initially I started off with the "Lose the keg and get a 6 pack" style of posts for the slimming and fitness products that are being promoted. Last week I altered the style and that produced some incredible results.
There are many ways with which we can fuel our interests and writing. For instance, we all have our favorite hobbies and tastes. Let us take them one by one and research them. Whether it is chocolate, dogs, sports cars or butterflies, let us dig deep into our objects of adoration and find everything we can in our exploration. This work will include looking into encyclopedias, documentaries, journals, collecting articles, interesting representative mementos, collecting photographs, recording video and audio snippets….anything and everything.
Generally, we cannot conduct research of this kind during our daily schedule. Divide your time into two parts - the first being the research and the second on the different kinds of write-ups that you will be doing later.