As writers, we all had this moment when we need to sit down and find new ideas. Forcing ourselves to do so is usually not the best way to find inspiration for writing.
Every day, we actually have several opportunities to come up with content ideas. By sticking to new habits, you can adopt an efficient way to get inspiration!
1 — Identify recurring questions in your conversations
During your conversations with friends or colleagues, there may be questions that come often. These can be about your job or hobbies for example.
Paying attention to that can help you identify some good topics for your content. If several people around you want to learn more on a subject, it’s a good sign that you can find an online audience for it.
Here are some examples I found, from conversations about my job and side project:
- How do you find time for your side project?
- What is content marketing?
- How many followers do you have? (to answer this one, I would write an article on why this number is not so important)
2 — Share your learnings
Another good approach is to think about what you recently learned. Some examples include:
- Your experience launching a new project: blog, podcast, business…
- How you addressed a challenge: getting more engagement on social media, finding ways to write more…
- Your recent learnings on a topic, after following a training or a webinar
In these processes, you probably looked for resources to help you. So why not creating your own content about it?
3 — Record your ideas at all times
Do you notice the ideas you get when you’re walking, reading or commuting?
The problem is that you may not pay attention, or forget them shortly after. To avoid it, write them down. You can use an app like Evernote or Google Keep. Or a classic notepad and a pen. It has to be easy and available anytime!
By the way, these ideas often happen when you’re not in front of a screen. So it’s important to plan some time offline. That will give you some inspiration for your online activities!
4 — Leverage your social media posts
It’s hard to predict which topics will get the most engagement. Social media can be an efficient way to test it before writing long-form content.
To do that, you can use social channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn. By talking about a variety of topics, you will find which ones resonate with your audience. If a post gets a good engagement, you can develop the topic further in an article.
Bonus tip: If you’re really motivated, you can try the concept of 10 ideas a day. Let’s be honest, it‘s hard to do it every single day, but you can try it at your own pace.
Ideas are the foundation of your content, and you have a lot of new ones daily. With these steps, you can have a content topics list that grows every day. And your problem may change: instead of not having enough topics to write about, you’ll have too many!
What are your methods to find new ideas?