Brainstorming is an excellent and popular method for getting the creative juices and engaging those child-like centers of your brain that can still see fresh ways of doing old things. If you want to see how the ultimate brainstorming pros do it, there is a great ABC Nightline video on how Silicon Valley darling IDEO transformed the old, standard shopping cart. Check it out. Go watch, it is cool. I will wait.
Okay, so the rules in brainstorming are:
- Quantity over quality
- No criticism (there's no such thing as a dumb idea in a brainstorming session)
- Weird ideas are good
- Combine ideas, or build off previous items on your brainstorming list
Set yourself a time limit in order to get as much brainstorming in as possible before the “editor” centers of your brain catch you in the act and start clamping down on the wild ideas. Most of them you will eventually throw out, but one or several might be the diamond in the rough that your site has been needing.
Alright, so now let us put together a brainstorming session on our favorite SEO topic: getting links. No idea is too wild or crazy. Just to get you started, I will throw out my own brainstorming list. Remember, creative is good. Weird is good. Crappy quality is fine. Do not criticize – just roll with it, break out the Text pad, and keep going!
Ways to Get Links:
- Become paparazzi so we can take celebrity photos and publish them ourselves.
- Make videos on some theme until one of them becomes viral. Potential themes: lolcatz, things kids do, emo kids, extreme sports, extreme sports gone horribly wrong
- Start a contest. Caption contest? Idea contest? Fund-raising contest?
- Spend the marketing budget buying links from relevant sources
- Make cool themed or branded .gifs or buttons for people to use on their blog or site
- Publish a news letter every week about the site's topic, and give its RSS link a prominent spot
- Send out press releases about the contest/review site/paparazzi
- Create a Facebook or iPhone app that does something cool – IQ test? Love quiz? Weight loss tracker? Which Lost Character Are You?
- Create or buy shareable online games that link back to the site
Upon review, we will find that most of the ideas I generated here are utterly worthless. (Quantity over quality, remember?) However, maybe one of them is worth a closer look. And then perhaps it is worth a bit of brainstorming around as its own topic, to build on and do some polish and tweaking. Then one of these ideas might become the basis of a new segment of your website, drawing new and more readers – and impressing the socks off the search engines.
