MBA1242 Where To Find Ideas For Your Content + Free Ride Friday!
2 Feb 2026 · 11 min
A short $100 MBA podcast episode (host Omar Zenhom) teaching where to find content ideas. Core recommendations: keep a "brain dump" Google Sheet; mine Facebook groups, Amazon/Yelp reviews, podcast guests, blog comments, past popular posts, and personal projects/challenges; solicit guest contributors. Episode includes multiple ad reads and a "Free Ride Friday" giveaway announcing winner Ray Roy.
Chapters
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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course step by step. You can check it out at EasyCourse co. It retails for $500 but somebody's going to win it for free today and you have a chance to win every Friday. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Then listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's our way to say thank you for leaving us love on itunes. Alright, let's jump into today's episode. Heyo. Welcome to the $100 NBA show pumping good business vibes in your ear every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn where to find ideas for your content. You have a blog post you have to publish every week or podcast episodes or videos that you're publishing on YouTube or on your website. And you're scratching your head trying to find ideas for content. What do people want to hear? What do they want to learn? What problems do they want to have solved? Well, in today's episode, I'm going to show you some places to look for great ideas for your content. For your specific content, we're not going to be talking about the procedure of a content schedule and a publishing schedule and all that stuff. Today, we're only focusing on where to generate ideas so you can dump those ideas in a word doc, in an Excel sheet, whatever it is, so you have a plethora of ideas for your content, so you're never scratching your head. You know exactly what to write for your next piece. All these ideas are easy to implement, they're free to use, and they're things I learned the hard way, trying to find fresh ideas all the time. Now I have no problem. And you might have noticed having published over 1200 episodes of this podcast. So we get into all of that in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. All right, let's jump into it. How do we generate ideas for our content? Whether we're blogging or podcasting or creating videos, my number one tip is to have a brain dump file. This is like the lazy way of journaling. So really, you should be journaling every day. You should be writing, even if it's just five minutes a day, writing about the challenges you're having, the things you accomplished that day, your hopes, your dreams, questions you might have in your head. It's just good to write down your thoughts every day. But if you can't journal or you don't journal, an easy alternative, which I do, is having a brain dump file. And this is literally a file I have on Google Sheets. It's called brain dump. And I can access it from my phone, from my computer. And anytime I have an idea in my head, whether it's a big idea, a small idea, a question, something I want to explore, a problem, I just open up this sheet and I jot it down. For example, I might be driving down the street and see a billboard and see an interesting ad, an interesting marketing technique, one company poking fun at another company, and that might trigger an idea. Hmm, that might be a nice topic for my podcast. Is that a risky thing to do? Should you poke fun, make fun of your competition? Is there a right way to do this? And I just jot down these ideas in the brain dump. Whether it gets published or not is another thing. Don't worry about that, don't worry about how it's going to get done. Right now, this is just an idea dump. Now, I might open up my brain dump file once or twice or three times a day, but the point is it's easily accessible and I can jot down ideas quickly. I, I find this so much easier for this purpose because if you journal, you might be saying, well, I'll write that down when I journal today. And you might forget. There's a good chance you'll forget. So number one, have a brain dump file and don't be selective about what goes in there. Even if you have a thought, you have an idea, you have a challenge that could be a topic for your next blog post, for your next piece of content. Number two, Facebook groups. Facebook groups are great because people love to complain, to rant, to ask questions, to ask for assistance. These are topics in your areas of expertise. So if you're a fitness expert, you're in a fitness group in Facebook, you're gonna get all kinds of questions and comments and rants about different topics in fitness. People that have challenges with diets, people have challenges with exercise, people can't lower their heart rate. Whatever it is, people are just giving away comments, ideas and questions that you can answer in a form of a piece of content. Now what I love about this is that you know for a fact that people wanna hear about this because they are screaming out for help. They're screaming out with a rant. It's on people's minds. And you can easily address these issues if you have some experience in helping them out in those areas. What else? I love Amazon reviews. Amazon reviews are one of the best ways to find ideas for content, specifically book reviews in your area of expertise. Say, for example, you're a leadership coach. Search all the leadership books on Amazon and read three star reviews. I like three star reviews because they're balanced. A little bit of praise, a little bit of constructive criticism where people say, I wish they talked about this part of the book. I have a problem with this. In my leadership, they didn't address it. Guess who can address it? You can with your piece of content. Now, of course, you can use Facebook groups and Amazon reviews in conjunction with your brain dump file. Get ideas, pop them in there. This is low hanging fruit. People are saying, I wish the book talked about this. I wish the author stressed this more or gave more examples in this area. So a blog post could be five examples of great leadership during hard times. Amazon's not the only place where you can get great ideas through reviews. Check out Yelp. Check out Google Reviews for businesses in your area of expertise. What do people like, what they don't like? So say, for example, your business is into dog grooming. That's your area of expertise. You look at all the businesses that do dog grooming and look at what people complain about. What are the top things people hate about going to a dog groomer? That's a blog post. The top five things that people hate about grooming their dog and how to solve them. And this next one is a gem. Podcast Listen to podcasts. Look at your market, your niche, and listen to podcasts that have great guests. Why? Because if that great guest gives great information on their topic on their area of expertise, you can message them, email them. Often on these shows, the host will say, you can reach today's guest o and so on Twitter, or this is their email. Reach out to them, say, hey, I heard your episode on so and so's show. Loved it. Thought you added a lot of value. Would you like to give our audience some of that knowledge, some of that expertise through a guest post? They can write you a guest post for your blog, or you can interview them and have that interview published on your blog or on your YouTube channel or on your podcast. You get the point. This is a great way to find great talent that can add value to your audience. You don't have to be the only person giving information when you're creating content. You can curate content, you can facilitate great content. And by having other experts chime in, your audience will love you for it. They'll say, hey, this person is bringing in great talent and teaching things that we would not be able to get elsewhere. You're also recognizing the fact you can't do everything. You can't be an expert at everything. You even in your own marketplace, you need to call upon other experts. Next comments on your own blog. If you have comments on your blog, people are gonna be asking questions, making comments. These are gonna give you some ideas. What are some of the questions they're asking? That could be a whole topic for your next piece of content. Next. Look at other pieces of content, have done well in the past and do a part two. If people really found a lot of value in one topic, they're gonna wanna learn more, expand upon it, take it to the next level, 102. Give them more at a higher level and both pieces of content will promote each other and help you grow. Next personal projects and challenges. If there's something you want to do in your business, Share it with your audience through a blog post, through a podcast episode, through a video. Let's say you said you want to increase your email list. You have 10,000 email subscribers and in the next 60 days you want to move it from 10 to 20,000. You're going to say, hey, this is my challenge. This is what I'm going to do. This is how I'm going to go about it. Share the experience with them, pull back the curtain and guess what? You can create another piece of content, updating them 30 days later. And then finally at the end, what was the result? That's another piece of content. This is sort of like an episodic series of content that people can follow along and see what happens next.
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All right, in today's episode, I gave you a ton of ideas of where to get ideas for your content. But it all starts with that Brain Dump file. Create that right now. That's your homework. Google Sheets is free. If you prefer Excel, go ahead. But I like Google Sheets because it's accessible on your phone, online, wherever you are. Create the file. Call it Brain Dump. It's going to take you five seconds, maybe 10, but at least you took action and now you have that file. And now you can start adding ideas so you're never running out of ideas or searching for ideas when it's time to write your content. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 VA Show. Today's episode is not over. It's free Ride Friday. I got to give away a lifetime membership to EZcourse, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. Step by step. It's $500 over at EasyCourse co. But hey, somebody's gonna win it for free today. You can win it as well. Just Leave us an itunes rating and review and listen in on next Friday to see if you've won. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is. Ray Roy. Ray Roy says great show and it's getting better. 5 stars. Omar is a great host and often shares the spotlight with great guest teachers. In 10 minutes a day I get a great deal of useful information. He recently had an episode on hiring superstar sales pros. I highly recommend it. Thank you Ray for that awesome review. You are our Free Ride Friday winner. Your mission is to email me@omar NBA.net so I can hook you up with the free ride. You too can win a free ride. Just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. That simple our way to say thanks for leaving us love on itunes. Alright, before I go, I want to leave you with this. The reason why the Brain Dump file works so well is because it's so helpful to separate idea generation and implementation. It's really hard to come up with ideas and implement at the same time. What you want to do is get all the ideas out first and then just choose an idea and take action and write or record or whatever you got to do. This allows you to just give yourself a task and go for it. Alright, thanks for listening. I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. I'll take care.
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