Here’s how I keep coming up with fresh content ideas after 720 episodes

When I first started this podcast, I had no idea what I'd be talking about 100 episodes later—let alone 720 episodes in! It can be tricky to keep the content fresh and sometimes I do run out of ideas. In today's episode, I'm sharing the methods I use to keep coming up with fresh content to share with my audience.

– How brainstorming content ideas with your team can help you to reveal what you may not know, or what you may be missing.
– The benefits of using your audience's feedback to create content that is relevant for them—and the questions you can ask them to find out what that is.
– How inviting your audience to write in with a problem or a question can provide great content for you to answer for your audience.
– How using AI tools like Chat-GPT can help you to generate content ideas—and how to avoid generic, broad results.
– Why reflecting on popular past content can give you new ideas for a different story or different perspective on content you have already used.

 

 
Today, I am answering a very common question that I get which is how on earth do you still keep coming up with things to talk about 720 episodes later? 

When I first started this show, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to talk about after a hundred episodes, to be honest, I do sometimes run out of ideas. So this episode, I'm going to share some of the things that I will do to get more episode ideas when the inspiration well runs a little bit dry. I usually come back to one of the methods that I'm going to share in this episode. 

 

#1: I ask my audience, what are your goals?

What are the obstacles standing in the way of you reaching these goals? Now, every year I send out a mid-year and an end-of-year survey, asking my audience questions like this. And when they tell me the obstacles that are standing in the way of their goals, I turn those into content.

For example, here's one that was from the survey that I sent out back in July. So somebody said, my goal is to create and launch my first online course and the obstacle that they said was fear and loads of work. 

Now, the content ideas that I get from that might be why you don't need to create your course before you launch it or maybe something like, Oh, are you afraid to launch your course? Here's what you need to know. Or how launching your course before creating it can ease the fear of launching. And this is way more useful content than just assuming I know what my audience wants or what they are struggling with.

 

#2: I ask my audience, what three questions they have about a topic. 

I also included this one in that survey. And the questions that they ask me then give me a ton of ideas for potential episode content, right? So I can create episodes that answer the questions. 

For example, this episode is answering a question that I get asked all the time, which is how do I come up with so many content ideas?

Another one that comes up a lot or one that came up actually in the media survey was what are the key things to focus on in the very beginning when money is low and you don't have help? 

 

#3: Team content brainstorming calls. 

We started doing this year as a team. So once every two months or so, I will jump on Zoom with Lauren and Jay who are on my team, and each has to bring 10 potential podcast episode ideas to the call and from those 10 ideas each, we usually end up with way more than 30 topics because one person will say. And then from that idea, we'll be like, Oh, and that's, then we could also do that. We could also try that. So we kind of bounce off each other and it ends up being a ton of new ideas in just one call.

This has been super helpful for me because you know, when it's just you brainstorming by yourself, you don't always know what you don't know. You don't always see what you are missing and especially now in my business where I'm not in the Facebook groups and the Telegram pods as much as Lauren and Jay are.

So they can tell me what kind of questions people are asking, and where they're struggling and that means that I can keep creating content that is relevant to my audience, but also relevant to my paying students. 

 

#4: I ask my listeners to write in with a dilemma or a question that they want advice on.

And I haven't done one of these episodes in a while because I just haven't had that many questions submitted. I love these episodes. I get to go a lot deeper into a specific problem or a specific situation and I usually pick the ones that are going to help as many people as possible, I still answer it in the way that that person has asked it, if that makes sense. 

So I'm still answering it from that person's specific situation rather than a general broad answer. The questions that get asked or questions get submitted also spark ideas for other episodes. 

 

#5: I paste my audience survey responses into chat GPT.

I give some examples of previous episodes that have performed well and then I ask it to give me some more topic suggestions based on the ones that have worked well and the questions and the problems that my listeners are struggling with. 

Now, some of the ideas it has come up with have been absolute duds.

 

#6: I look at the episodes that have performed well.

I think about if there are ways I can talk about the same concept with a fresh take or a new story, or give a different way of explaining it.

Now, you guys aren't going back and listening to all 720 episodes. So something that performed really well two years ago is probably not on your radar or even if you listened to it two years ago, you've probably forgotten about the concept I was explaining. So I go back, I look at those kinds of episodes that have performed well, and then I share a different take on it, or I update it if I've learned something new, or I explain it differently.

I use new stories and new analogies, everything is content, right? Every time something happens in my life, I'm like, Ooh, that could be, that could be an analogy for something in business. 

 

#7: I look at previous episodes and I zoom in or zoom out on each of these topics.

So for each topic, we can either go deeper or we can go broader. We can zoom in or we can zoom out.

So for example, if I'm sharing an episode about how I come up with content ideas. In today's episode, I might zoom in and then share an episode on how I survey my audience to get more content ideas or I could zoom out and share an episode on what I think makes a good content topic. I could zoom in and create an episode on how I zoom in on content topics and I could zoom out and I could talk about how I repurpose my old content topics to come up with more ideas.

 

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