WPblab EP90 – Just Create January – An Incubator and Accountability Group

New Year presents new goals and new opportunities to either make them or fail. It can go either way, so with our community, we thought we’d do what community does: support one another. This is why Jason created “Just Create January.” Every day of this month in our Facebook group, we have an opportunity to be accountable, share, and even brainstorm with one another. On this week’s show, we’ll chat about the motivation and results so far and what we’d like to see from all of us in 2018.

BridgetWillard.com | Gutenbridget.com

JasonTucker.blog

There are lots of accountability & challenge groups that start at the beginning of the year; Jason and Bridget thought it would be a great idea to create something like that for marketers/creators

Jason joined a blogging group – they would provide a prompt and members would write about it each day.

#JustCreateJanuary was started to help encourage ‘creation’ of all kinds – blogging, design, video, web, etc. They didn’t start it to build a community – the WPblab community already exists – they did it so we all can create and encourage each other.  It’s different from other challenges because we are already all connected.

Sometimes you just need another person to say that should be a blog post or that should be a video, etc.

Using Facebook to manage the challenge since everyone uses Facebook – one post per day in the group (at 5am) will encourage group members to participate

Submit your creations to the group each day and then others can comment and share and encourage you

https://www.facebook.com/ThingDotDo/

Talking with other people in a group and brainstorming together can help you realize that you have something to share.  The point is to ‘do something’!

Sometimes you just get in a rut, but as you share and talk it out with each other, it can make creation easier

https://lorennason.com/category/create/ – Loren Nason’s curation of the responses to the #JustCreateJanuary challenge

There’s a vulnerability involved with creating – it’s yours and it comes from who you are (very personal). It’s nice to have a place where you feel psychologically safe to share your content with before posting.

Ways of Sharing Content

• Share a Draft Plugin – https://wordpress.org/plugins/shareadraft/ “share a draft with your friends or colleagues for either review or approval.” – you can also set it so the link expires after some time
• www.Dribbble.com | www.Behance.net (Adobe) – designers share & get inspiration from each other
• Better Click to Tweet – https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-click-to-tweet/ – allows you to easily create tweetable content for your readers. Using a shortcode, your selected text is highlighted and made tweetable.
• https://codepen.io and https://github.com for sharing code (or just post it on your blog)
• Make a private board on pinterest and only share it with people that you choose, and make public later. Or, if you don’t want to share on a public site like Dribbble, CodePen, GitHub – share it on your personal website

It can be intimidating to post on sites where other designers / developers can see your work, but it’s a great way to improve your skills and show how far you’ve come

Another option is to share on #JustCreateJanuary and get feedback from a smaller community or message one of the members for feedback/advice

It’s fun to experiment and remember why we’re creators and why we do what we do – we’re all makers!

Sharing with the group can help build confidence by seeing and commenting on each other’s work in a safe space, where you can get feedback and encouragement

At the end of the day, WPblab is about people who are trying to market themselves, market their customers – #JustCreateJanuary is an extension of that

Bridget’s first GitHub repo was about women’s shirt sizes (and inconsistency) at conventions – it’s not just for code.  Anyone can comment on repo’s – it’s like commenting on a blog.

#JustCreateJanuary can help keep you out of the ‘rut’!

Go ahead and write something on a piece of paper and share it to the group – all creation is encouraged! Choose whatever medium works best for you!  It can just be code .. it can just be the start of a blog post … or if it’s something private for a client, you can just say what you are working on, even if you can’t share it

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Thanks for helping with our show notes!

• Cheryl LaPrade @yaycheryl 🙂
• Sherie LaPrade @heysherie  🙂
• James Tryon @jamestryon