One of the biggest challenges for content creators is coming up with ideas for whatever it is they are going to write about or talk about. We tend to think that our content has to revolve around some earth shattering idea. I struggled with this for years and found content creation exhausting, struggling to find an idea for an article as the impending deadline loomed.
Then I started to do something that made my life much easier. I wrote about what I was seeing, experiencing and realizing on any particular day. Now this might seem kind of obvious, but for a lot of people it isn’t. For some reason I undervalued my daily realisations and observations – I didn’t think they were significant enough, until I started getting incredible feedback from people.
The most common piece of feedback was something along the lines of “it feels like you’re reading my mind. That’s exactly my problem at the moment and you’ve solved it for me. Thank you so much.” So I started to value to my daily observations and realizations because I knew that if I could solve other people’s problems, or make them feel OK about how they are thinking or the mistakes they may be making, my content would have value.
When I need to write an article, I pause and reflect for a few minutes, thinking about what has been happening in my world recently. There is always something that has happened, or that I have seen or found interesting and I was pretty sure others would find it not only interesting but helpful. And my article would come really easily.
Over the years I’ve learned to train myself to think like this every day. This means that I’m always looking for an interesting story, an observation or a realization based on what is happening in my world right now. This approach makes it really easy for me to create content.
In fact I write down my story ideas throughout the day and generally I discover between five and ten articles. Now some of them might not stand up to my second review when I’m looking at them again, but most do.
This means I always have a list of potential article ideas that I can draw upon as needed. Right at this moment I have 158 possible article ideas that I will turn into blog posts, feature articles, videos, podcast episodes and a host of other content.
My advice to you is simple, if you want to get really good at creating content, get really good at observing what is going on around you. Do this and you will never struggle to come up with an idea for your content again.
