3 ways to ensure you never run out of content ideas

Hey friends,

Deciding to build your personal brand is always exciting. You’re eager to share your knowledge and perspective with others, and can’t wait to build a thriving community and make new friends. But soon, you find yourself running out of ideas. You feel like you’ve exhausted all the topics to talk about and don’t know what to say next…

We’ve certainly been there. We can’t tell you how many times we’ve spent days racking our brains for relevant topics that would add value to our community…only to have a lightbulb go off in our brains at the last minute. We would sit down and bang out a killer newsletter but the second we’d hit ‘send’, we’d be back to square one.

Needless to say, this was stressful and unsustainable. We knew we had to come up with better ways to generate content ideas. This made us develop a process for generating new ideas, which has given us a pipeline of great newsletter topics for weeks to come.

Now, we want to share our framework with you. Here’s a simple guide to ensure you never run out of ideas again.

List your own challenges

One of the first things we did when we found ourselves idea-constrained was list all the content-related challenges we were encountering. Then, we examined them to see if any of them would apply to other people who are building audiences.

Idea generation? Check. Speeding up distribution? Check. We knew instantly that our challenges would likely be relevant to most other people who are creating content. If we solved them, we would have valuable information to share (just like we’re doing in this newsletter).

This is probably true for you as well. Which of your challenges are likely to also apply to your audience? Do you have a good idea of how to solve them? Great. All you need to do is share it. Bonus points, if you can come up with a framework.

Listen to your audience

Oftentimes, the best content ideas can come from your audience. People may reply to you with questions, comments or ideas. You can easily use this to fuel your creativity and create the content people clearly want.

What if you’re early in your audience building journey and don’t get consistent replies yet? The good news is that you don’t have to rely only on your own audience. Instead, you can look into what people across different channels are saying about your topic of expertise. You can do this by monitoring your LinkedIn feed for relevant content or using the Advanced Search feature on Twitter to learn what questions people are asking.

The best thing about this? You can not only create content people want, but also engage with these people and expand your audience. Double win.

Surround yourself with interesting people and ideas

The best way to engineer serendipity into your life is to constantly surround yourself with people that inspire you. This is also why so many of us are building audiences - having a strong online presence often unlocks friendships and opportunities.

But there is another benefit to meeting interesting people: it can spark new ideas. We often feel the most creative when we are having stimulating conversations with other people. They will often ask questions or say things that may ignite something in you, resulting in a seemingly endless flow of ideas. That’s why we deliberately seek out such conversations and try to meet at least 1-2 new people every week.

Of course, we know that not everyone thrives on constant human contact. Trust us, we definitely need our alone time as well. That’s why we like to balance. Often, an interesting article may produce the same result as a fascinating conversation. If you expose yourself to various ideas, across multiple fields, you may find yourself connecting dots you never imagined. Creativity is all about remixing and rematching.

So, there you have it. Our simple 3-step process for creating an ever-faster spinning flywheel of content ideas.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

With love,

Team Salley

What is Salley?

Salley helps you build habits that allow you to create a strong online presence. With us, you can stay accountable and earn stress alleviating rewards for hitting your content goals.