Ugh, it’s ideation time again and my wheels turn empty. Try this proven method that fills your editorial calendar with ideas your audience will love.
“Nothing comes to my mind!”
“Everything’s already been said by someone else, and they’ve said it better!”
“No-one is going to read this anyway…”
These kinds of thoughts tend to circle in many entrepreneurs’ heads when they sit down to brainstorm new content ideas. It seems like there are no new ideas, everything has been done already and why bother anyway?
Everyone lacks ideas sometimes. I’m sharing with you today five strategies that have been tested and proven efficient by creatives, content creators and entrepreneurs.
They will fill up your creative well with fresh ideas – that your audience will love, too!
Read more: Want to publish content regularly? Polish your planning process.
Ask your audience
When trying to come up with ideas, the first thing to do is to ask your audience what they need.
If you have a strong social media following, pop a question on your page or group every now and then.
Here are some ideas:
- What are you struggling with?
- If I created a freebie for you, what would you like it to be about?
- What is holding you back in your business?
- What keeps you from reaching your dreams?
- What is the difference you want to bring about in the world?
Go through social media and blog comments
Comments and answers to your questions will give you a lot of food for thought.
In addition, go through comments and questions you receive from your followers on a daily basis. Are there some new viewpoints you haven’t yet covered? Some unanswered questions?
Don’t limit yourself only to your own pages and groups: note also questions people ask on similar groups and blogs. Then you can develop a new piece of content that answers those questions.
Spy on Quora
Along the same lines, you can also spy on the question and answer site Quora.
Follow a few categories that are close to your topic and use the threads for inspiration. You’ll see quickly that similar questions repeat themselves over and over. When you identify a pattern or an idea you hadn’t thought about, get to work and create content that answers those questions.
Usually, the simplest ideas are the best so make sure you answer the basic questions of your topic often enough.
Develop other people’s ideas
You can also spy on your competitors. What are they talking or writing about? Are there important pieces of information that they are missing or are there aspects you could elaborate further?
Again, keep an eye on the comments to spot the eventual blind areas that haven’t been covered by the original poster.
Rework your best content
Then, last but not least, comes your own content. Take a look at your statistics to find out what your audience loves and what kind of content has worked well in the past.
Then you can rework some of your most popular content, for example like this:
- Update your most popular article with fresh information
- Develop a point of view that you only mentioned briefly in your previous article
- Cover the opposite opinion you did last time – you can also let people know if you’ve changed your mind on a subject or if there is important new information
- Republish a good piece of content that is still relevant
- Repurpose content for your other channels, e.g. turn a blog post into a series of social media posts, elaborate on a social media topic to transform it into a blog post. A popular, evergreen blog post can also make a wonderful ebook that your followers can download.
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