How To Never Run Out Of Content Ideas Again

I can't emphasize enough, content strategy is— can be summarized very simply. A content strategy is you write lots of helpful things about a topic.

Mm-hmm.

That's all. So whatever topic you're helping the client write about, the content strategy is let's write helpful things in the realm of that topic a lot. That's, that's the only thing that matters. I think when coming up with content ideas, The most helpful framework is not to think in ideas, it's to think in questions. So a lot of times, whenever I notice people are like, "I'm stuck. I don't know how to come up with high-quality ideas," it's because ideas are— they tend to be amorphous. It's like trying to come up with, "How do I tell a joke?" You know, it's hard. It's sort of hard to wrap your head around. It's significantly easier to to start from a place of what questions does my target reader have? So just as a question for you is for this client related to whatever topic this is, what are 3 questions that customers would have about this topic?

Oh, that's good. I have to think about that, but he's in the branded podcast space. So he's thinking of working with enterprise advertisers and helping develop branded podcasts for them. So of course, I think he would know those core questions better than I do, but I think that's a great way for me to frame it so he knows what kind of content would be best suited for them.

Yeah, but I think you can, you can help him come up with those high-quality questions. So let's just think about it. And also everyone here, if you want to, if you have any, any ideas for questions, drop them in the chat. But like, challenge yourself for a second. What is— if you're talking to advertisers, who wanna sponsor branded podcasts, what are questions that that person in that company has?

Yeah, so these execs would definitely care about ROI. If I'm dumping tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars into a branded podcast, how could this benefit our brand?

Yeah, if I invest $100,000 into a branded podcast, how long does it take me How long does it take for me to recoup my money? If I invest $100,000 into a branded podcast, what does that actually buy me? If I have a 6-figure budget for branded podcasts, how do I identify people that are worth funding? These are all, these are all questions. And so the content is just answering lots of different questions. Does that make sense?

It does. It does. And the reason why I asked is because again, there's so much— I think you mentioned this before— around cold emailing. Everyone has a different take on how to cold call and do that. Same thing when it comes to, I guess, content creation. Everyone talks about different themes, whether it's like education, inspiration, this, that, and the third. So I guess for me, I was thinking about it from the standpoint of like content themes or content buckets, and that's what made it difficult for me to figure out how to go about advising him on creating content. But I like what you said. You said in terms of just thinking about it from a question standpoint. What are the questions the main customers would have about this, and how can we create content based off that?

Yeah, if you want a quick hot take, I think unless you are in the entertainment business, meaning your business is entertainment, not your— not you're talking about entertainment, like your business is entertainment, MrBeast YouTube channel type, like entertainment I don't think it's helpful thinking of content through the lens of entertainment or, you know, I do education here, I do education 50% of the time, I do entertainment 50% of the time. Like, it's not— that doesn't work. The way to think about it, and unless you are in the entertainment space, which is different, then content is entertainment, right? So then if it's not entertainment, the only thing you need to understand for a content strategy is what are all the questions that my reader has? And I will tell you, and I'll tell everyone here, I promise that sounds really simple, and you'll come up with like 8 questions, and then you'll be like, I guess those are all the questions. I promise you, those are not all the questions. I've been writing about these topics and answering questions for 10 years, and every day I come up with new questions to answer. So there, the rabbit hole goes very deep. And so the skill to build is being able to push beyond, okay, yeah, these are the 5 or 10 like surface level questions. What are the nuanced questions? And a real, a really great way of identifying this is you should tell the client, record all of your sales calls, because I guarantee you in every single sales call there are questions. And then you can take each question and you can unbundle it further. You can be like, all right, so let's take this same question but answer it for this archetype of person versus this archetype of this person versus this outcome versus this problem? Just think of content as questions.

Think of content as questions. And, and with that being said, that's where I apply the, the 10 magical ways.

Yeah, you start with a question. So let's take a question: if I invest $100,000 into a branded podcast, how much reach should I expect over the course of a year? I could answer that question with reasons, mistakes, tips, steps. Like the, the 10 Magical Ways is here are all the ways to answer questions, but the way you come up with ideas is by starting with the question itself.

That was very helpful. And I guess last question, because again, I know when it comes to content creation, the hook is everything. So what would you say is like your gut check way to understand if your hook is good or not? Because sometimes I do leverage these LLMs and I don't know if Claude is saying, yeah, this hook is good. And I'm like, hmm, I don't know. And I'll go with it. And I'm not necessarily seeing the, I guess, the result I'm looking for. Okay, cool. Thanks.

Yeah. By the way, I mean, I have like a gazillion materials on this, but like here, these are the 6 I come back to over and over again. And whenever I'm writing prompts, These, these are the rules that I'm inserting into the prompt. There are 6 typical openers: strong declarative sentence, thought-provoking question, controversial opinion, moment in time, vulnerable statement, weird unique insight. Now, obviously, if you don't give AI a tremendous amount of context and instruction, it might give you a question, it might give you a thought-provoking question, but you still might read it and be like, eh, that isn't very good. So that's, that's why I stress the importance of both. It's like, yes, learn how to leverage AI, but also practice and build the skill yourself because you're going to be the one who's quality controlling the technology. I also want to point out for everyone here, like, just observe what's happening. Wadness, you, you asked me a question and I gave you an answer. And our video team is gonna clip out my answer and post it as a Short. So the content is, I'm not coming up with the ideas, right? Like you actually gave me the idea 'cause you asked the question. And so my answer to the question is the content. That's the thing to understand is like, that is the whole game. And when you think about like how do you build a, authority in a niche or authority in an industry. Authority is just, I've been answering lots of questions in this niche for a prolonged period of time. That's, that's all it is.

No, I love that. Authority is pretty much like time spent in that niche answering questions.

Yeah.

Awesome. Awesome. This is super helpful. Thank you.

Cool. Great question. I appreciate you asking it real quick. If you want to write online but aren't sure where to start, click the link in the description of this video and check out startwritingonline.com. This is a free masterclass I put together sharing all of our most helpful frameworks for beginners, like proven hooks to capture your target reader's attention, where to write online to get the most distribution on your work, and little growth hacking tips to build your social audience and email list faster. Over 100,000 writers have gone through this free masterclass, and many even send us emails afterwards thanking us for sharing such valuable information for free. So click the link below this video to check it out and make this year the year you start seeing success from your writing online.