How to find content ideas when you feel like you’ve exhausted them all
August 5, 2021
Struggling to find content ideas when you feel like you have exhausted them all? Believe me, I've been there. Over 408 podcast episodes and blogs, there have been a lot of moments where I thought I could not possibly draw any more blood out of the stone of content ideas. And yet every time that I run out of ideas, I sometimes step away for a little bit, and then I come back to the podcast and I have more ideas. And a lot of the time it's sharing some of the same ideas that I've shared in the past, but just in a different way. Sometimes it's completely new ideas. Other times I might've taught something in the past and I might have completely changed my perspective on it or change my opinion on it. So, let's have a look at six different ways that you can find some new content ideas when you feel like you have exhausted them all.
6 ways to come up with fresh content when you have run out of ideas
#1 – Talk to your audience
This, I cannot say this one enough, jump on a live Q and A. Send them a survey. Hop on a Zoom call one-on-one with some of them. Whatever way works best for you. Talk to them. Find out what do they want to learn from you. What are they struggling with? Where are they feeling frustrated?
#2 – Listen to your audience
So don't just talk to them, but listen to what they're saying. What are they saying online? What are they saying when you catch up with them on a Zoom call? What are your clients complaining about when you have a consult with them? Have a look in places like Facebook groups, Reddit, Quora. What are people asking? The comment sections. And if you don't have a very big audience, maybe it means going and looking at the comment sections of other people in your industry and seeing what people are saying, what people are asking for.
#3 – Look to others in your industry
Now, I don't mean go and copy the content that they're creating. Don't do that. We do want to be original. But instead, look at what they're saying, what their opinions are, what they're telling people to do. And maybe there's something that you don't agree with. Maybe everyone in your industry is telling people to zig and you actually think that they need to zag. Talk about it, be open with your opinions, even if they are unpopular opinions because even if your opinions repel some of the wrong people, they're going to attract the right people. And repelling the wrong people is just as important as attracting those right people into your business.
#4 – Create some kind of framework
So chances are that the topic you teach or the process that you guide your clients through, you've already got that information in your head and you can distil it out of your head and into a framework of some kind. And then when you're creating your free content, you can pull little parts from your framework and you can refer back to it. And ideally, your main framework will be inside your paid product or your paid service, but you can still give little parts of that framework in your free content. And that way you won't run out of ideas.
#5 – Always be on the lookout for real-life examples and stories
Even ones that you don't think are related at all to what you do. You'd be amazed somehow at how you can relate these stories back to what you do. So for example, I recently shared an email with my email list about this time that I took my dog to a dog beach and he pooped on a stranger's jacket that was sitting on the beach. And I turned it into a story about how the training of my puppy hasn't been fantastic, but for me to expect him to suddenly be trained, I can't just keep doing the same thing that I've been doing and expecting different results. And I tied that into business about how if you keep doing the same thing over and over in your business and expecting different results, they're not going to happen. So even though my dog pooping on a random person's jacket on the beach was totally unrelated to what I was teaching, it was still something that I could tie back and create a piece of content out of.
#6 – Read books
Even ones that aren't related to your industry or what you do, especially the ones that aren't related to your industry, because you'll often find that you learn concepts from these different areas that you can bring back and apply to yours. So for example, I read a lot of mindset books. They're not even business mindset books. Most of them are just mindset. And because launching is such a mindset game, I can take a lot of the things that I learned from these general mindset books, and I can apply them to launching.
So there you have it, six ways to come up with some content ideas even when you feel like you've run out of everything. I'd love to hear how you come up with your content ideas.
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