Todd Henry, author of Accidental Creative, speaks often to the need for those in the creative industry to recharge their ideas and personal energy long before they’ve worn out. From afternoons spent researching to mornings spent reading, being talented doesn’t matter much if most of your time is spent recovering from working too hard. The process is called creative renewal.

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Weekend warriors certainly understand this. If they ignore athletic activity during the week (think weight training, yoga, etc.), the likelihood of injury on Saturday or Sunday goes way up, which makes it hard to do anything more than recover during the next week, which makes getting injured again likely.

There are ways to both stave off burnout AND call up those extra creative juices when necessary; but it does take a little bit of planning.

Workload
For many of us, there’s just too much work to be done. Sure, you COULD stay late every night and sacrifice necessary relaxation time to finish, but that too often leads to mediocre results. Henry suggests, among other things, to talk about the pressure.

Find someone — doesn’t have to be in your industry — and share what’s going on. This could be over coffee or beers, during a midday call or a weekend brunch. We too often think our creative renewal problems are unique to us, when most of the time we’re all suffering in silence.

Clarify Goals
Creative work typically start with a blank slate. Yes, we often have a framework or notes to draw upon, but copywriting, code and design don’t create themselves on their own. This freedom is fantastic, and allows us to build services we previously never thought possible. Problem is, how do you know when you’re done if you a) aren’t sure where you started and b) never clarified what you hoped to create?

Henry has an answer for this dance with uncertainty, and it’s as simple as focusing on clarity and staying away from imagined consequences (e.g. saying “I need to get this job done so I can get paid” instead of “If I blow this deadline I’ll lose my clients and my family”). Seek to paint a clear picture of what you’re trying to do, then figure out how to do it.

Create Unnecessarily
This last one likely makes the least sense to anyone not in a creative gig: unnecessary creation. These are projects in which you receive no pay (at least not initially) and have no timeline or deadline. Far too many professionals see this kind of work as frivolous, a waste of time and resources, and, because it’s not billable, unproductive.

Sometimes this kind of play is exactly what we all need to recharge our minds, as without boundaries or other limitations, we’re free to combine and transform our previous work and thoughts into ideas we never thought possible before.

Used to copywriting? Write a short story.
Build big websites? Try a simple app.
On sales calls all day? Sit down with a potential client and sell him nothing.

This is not to say a few days of high-pressure, deadline-intensive work can’t produce quality work — just that in order to keep that up, each of us must recognize the need to recharge periodically. With proper planning, a little willpower and a belief in our processes, we can continue to create on demand while delivering high-quality product.

Good luck.

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SEO for writers sounds like some tacked on, unimportant obligation necessary for online writing, but it’s not. Similarly as to how proper formatting, page design, and subject matter can make writings more attractive to people, a few, simple tips can help make your writing more attractive to search engines without compromising the integrity of your piece.

Got it? Good.

Writers often ignore much of the SEO advice most bloggers have come to accept as part of their writing process. Keywords, meta descriptions, URLs and linkable passages are seen as dirty and cheap instead of proper formatting for a web-based article.

For years, my journalism-trained self thought the same: SEO is the devil, Google presence was less important than story integrity, and, most of all, adjusting words for any reason of than making the story better a crime against the literary gods.

It ain’t true.

In the same way fancy book covers help get books noticed, SEO can help more people see the work you’re doing. Here’s a guide to make writing for the web a little easier.

What Readers Want
Fancy writers often provide long, expository statements at the beginning of their stories. Whether this is to set the mood, provide backstory, or to show off, it is WORTHLESS for most online pieces (many would argue that if a story even needs exposition, it should be rewritten). Journalism may call this a lede, but bloggers probably call it “the important part”.

This is where your keywords come in. Writing about SEO For Writers? You should mention that once or twice in your first paragraph. Heck, you should probably mention that every 100-150 words — SEO best practices recommend the same.

This is best accomplished by writing content first, then going back and changing terms where applicable. Readers don’t care about fancy wordplay, they want to know what the story is about — also, search engines will be able to properly index your content by subject.

Why They Want It
Now that you’ve identified your keywords and inserted them as necessary, the second part of our writing pyramid is telling readers why they want to read about the keyword you’ve chosen. The most successful writers are big on trying themed stories to their keywords, which makes for a nice balance of human-readable storytelling and can be used to create a properly written meta description later.

This second part is where readers can clearly tell if someone is writing with them in mind, or simply producing content for search engines. The web has enough of this, feel free not to muddy the water — toss chum in instead.

Explanation
The last piece of the SEO for writers pyramid should have all the “boring” stuff, like how to get more information, where the information can be found, and when all this is happening. Smart writers will see this section as content great for lifting tags from, as they can be used to classify content for better archive/search engine discovery.

Remember, tags are not keywords, but rather descriptive terms used to provide context for whatever results you’re looking for.

Now stop worrying about SEO and write your piece. As long as you write stories using some variation of the above framework, SEO comes easy after the fact.