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How to generate 100+ ideas in 27 minutes
Here's Content Ideation 101
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Consistency.
It’s the most challenging part of building writing skills and growing your audience online.
Consistency, day after day, for months and years.
Whenever I ask folks what challenges they’re facing with consistency, one of the most common responses is: “I just don’t know what to write every day.”
Coming up with ideas is their blocker.
Today, I’d like to simplify ideation for you.
If I was early on in my content creation journey, this would be exact ideation process:
Step 1
I’d list out 2-3 things I know extremely well (or WANT to know extremely well).
A few personal examples:
What I’ve learned from writing online or 15+ years
Lessons learned from studying high-performing people
Skills, habits and mindsets developed from being an athlete
These cover much of what I write about in The Daily Creator, The Process and on social media every day.
Step 2
I’d apply frameworks to each of these topics to come up with ideas.
Here are a few frameworks I love to use:
Lists
Tips + advice
Mistakes made
Earned insights
Personal stories
Lessons learned
Step-by-step guides
Curious observations
Other peoples’ stories
There are many other frameworks you can apply.
Think of different lenses you can view a topic through that sparks different thoughts.
Step 3
Run my 2-3 topics through each of these frameworks.
A quick example using what I’ve learned from writing online.
Lists
10 things I’ve learned writing online
10 tips to write more effective hooks
10 ways to get more engagement online
10 traps to avoid when building your audience
10 strategies to convert followers into customers
Mistakes made
The time I wrote a post that almost got me fired
Mistakes I made in my first year writing online
Mistakes I’ve continued to make (and why)
Personal stories
Why I love to write
The piece of content I’m most proud of
The worst trolls I’ve experienced online (and how to deal with that
Etc…
You get the idea of this exercise, so I won’t keep going with my own examples.
But you could pretty quickly come up with 10+ ideas for each of the nine frameworks I’ve listed above.
That’s 90-100 pieces of content waiting to be written.
MONTHS of content.
Step 4
Start writing the ideas you came up with.
That’s literally it.
All of you have way more ideas inside of you than you realize.
You just don’t know the frameworks to help pull them out, or you haven’t sat down and made the time to get your ideas on paper.
But there’s no need to make it more complicated than this.
Action Item
Do the above exercise.
Set a 3-minute timer for each framework, and don’t overthink or judge your ideas.
You’ll run through all nine frameworks in less than 30 minutes and be shocked at how many ideas you suddenly have.
If you want to get more sophisticated, I wrote a LinkedIn post about the most powerful writing framework I’ve found. But the exercise above is plenty to get you started.
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