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Coming up with content ideas a struggle?
Is coming up with content ideas a struggle? Never know what to say when it’s time to create your newest podcast episode, post to Instagram or write an email to your list? Have zero idea what it means when people tell you to just listen to your audience to know what to say?
If so, today’s episode is for you. I’m sharing 7 SPECIFIC ways you can find inspiration for your content, and with these 7 ways, I promise you’ll never run out of things to say!
You’re listening to the Chasing Simple podcast, episode 069, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. Let’s dive in.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Take the first lesson in Club Content Batching – for free!
- Check out Haylee Gaffin and learn more about her SEO services.
- This week’s action step: Come join my content ideas challenge! Content Generator – a 5-day challenge to amp up your content ideas and inspiration. Walk away with over 50 ideas for what to say to your audience.
- This week’s book recommendation: Beach Read by Emily Henry
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
Did you love this episode?
Don’t forget to subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Also, if you would be willing to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, it would mean the world to me. It’s such a small thing that can make a big difference in helping me spread this message of simplicity to other overwhelmed women.
Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate.
The first place that you can find inspiration for your content is simply just to ask your audience over on Instagram stories. Now there are couple of different ways that you could do this. Two ways that I tend to do at most are first, I will drop just a, a broad question box into my story and say, Hey.
What kind of content do you want to see more for me? What kind of topics do you want me to cover? Usually I’ll give them a little bit of guidance. Like you could say this, this, this, or this. Sometimes I leave it really open-ended. I like the question box because a lot of times they will tell me something that I hadn’t thought of before.
And that’s always really valuable, but I tend to get less response when I do those. And it’s more open-ended because, It takes more energy for someone to go out of their way to think about that question, think about what their answer is, and then also type in a response. So keep that in mind with that. The other way I do this, that tends to get a lot more response because it’s it’s frankly it’s easier and simpler for them is doing a series of stories.
So let’s say you have eight different topics that you want to get their feedback. You can run four different polls. So you could say, okay, would you rather hear topic A, topic B, topic C, topic D, topic E, topic F, topic G, topic H? Then you look at those responses that you get. And if you know, one blows the other out of the park, maybe that one, the one that got blown out of the water, I mean. Maybe that one is one that you put on the back burner for now, but if you end up with a poll that gets pretty, even if not exactly, even, but kind of even answers. That means that both of them are probably pretty good topics and people probably had a hard time choosing, so you could use both of those and then that way you can kind of gauge, okay. What do people like based off of the responses you get, and you’re able to get responses, gauge responses from more people, because they’re more likely to answer just a simple poll. And you’re able to really decide, okay, there are this many topics here that I’ve asked about. I can take away and use this many.
So asking her Instagram stories is always a great way to do it. And then even if you did the polls, you could pop in a slide that said, if there’s anything else you want to hear about, please tell me. And again, any extra work that someone has to do on social media, they’re not likely to do it. So keep that in mind, but it’s always worth the ask .
The second way that I specifically looks at my audience for content inspiration is with an annual survey. I try to put at least one of these out a year and I actually print off the answers every year. So I have it sitting beside me and I’m going to read off the questions that I asked from last year survey.
And you can decide if those are your questions you want to ask or not, but I figured you’d like the inspiration for that.
first and foremost, I asked which of the following best describes you. And I gave them a couple different options, such as content creator, not a business owner, newer business owner. I’m kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall, established business owner, I’ve got some kind of service that sells in some way.
pro-level business owner, hoping to be an official business owner. Some people. Their own things, business owner in training, so on and so forth. But I gave them a few options. Some people added their own options in, but it gave me an idea of who I was talking to because I talk to people who are managing their time and who are creating content.
And there’s a wide range of people who follow me. I’ve got some people who, you know, they’ve taken club content batching, just because they create content. Not because they’re, they have a business at this point, but some people are experienced full-time business owners that. Working in their business, 40 hours a week.
This is their full-time job. It’s the only thing they’re doing. I’ve got side hustlers, I’ve got a whole gamut. So I wanted to really know who I was talking to and who I had the most of in my audience.
The next question I asked was, are you a listener of the Chasing Simple Podcast? And there were three options they could say, yes, I love to binge it. They could say occasionally, or they could say never heard of it. And the reason I asked this is because I was really curious how many people in my audience, because I shared about this survey on my email list and I shared about it on Instagram.
I want to know how many people between those two audiences actually listened to the podcast and maybe how many didn’t even know. It existed. And there weren’t a lot of people that said they didn’t know it existed, but some people did. And so that was a big wake up call to me of, oh, I need to get better about talking about the podcast, especially on Instagram, then I did an open-ended questioned. And I said, what is your biggest struggle right now when it comes to time management? Please be as specific and detailed as possible. This right here has been gold. For one, knowing how to shape my services, but to coming up with content.
Then I asked, what is your biggest struggle right now when it comes to managing and running your business? Please be as specific and detailed as possible
And again, that was a great way to, get content ideas coming at things from a little different side of things. I said, I would like to see more of blank from you
and I give him a couple different things and they could rank them from strongly disagree to strongly agree. So I had seven different options. First was simplifying your business strategy, then how to find work-life balance then managing your time well, then struggles of entrepreneurship and content batching, then batch scheduling and boundaries for time management.
And this gave me a really good one idea of what content topics people wanted to hear from me. And then I could take that and take that into my strategy. And then I said, if you could ask me just one question about time and business management, what would it be? Also an open-ended question where I can really gauge what people wanted to hear from me about.
And finally I said, is there anything else you think I should know, or that you’d like to see more of in the future? And I got a ton of stuff about club content, batching about content batching in general, things like that. So. That honestly really just opened my eyes to the fact that I didn’t ask any content batching questions really.
And that was what my audience was mainly there for.
So real quick, I’m going to run through those questions one more time in case you wanted to write them down or steal them or anything. First, which of the following best describes you. And that is where I was getting an idea of what my audience looked like, specifically in relation to who I thought I was teaching to.
Then they asked if they were a Chasing Simple Podcast listener. I asked what their biggest struggle was with time management.
I asked what their biggest struggle was when it came to managing and running their business. I asked what they wanted to see more of from me.
I asked if you could ask me just one question about time and business management, what would it be? And then finally I gave one last, is there anything else that you think I should know or that you would like to see more of in the future from me?
And that has been so great for pulling content ideas, because it is specifically straight from my audience. So asking on Instagram stories and doing an anal, or those are two really, really key ways that I have been able to specifically find out from my audience, what they want to hear.
The third way that I’ve found great content information is from my SEO audit that I had done by Haley Gaffin. And if you do your own SEO audit, that’s great. That works too here. I personally thought I knew what I was doing with SEO and she ran something telling me what I was ranking for. And I was ranking for absolutely nothing that I should have been ranking for. One of the things that I was ringing for was cat hanging egg chair. And I have no idea where on my website I would have ever had those words or a picture of our cat egg chair or , yes, we have a cat egg chair, but I don’t know how that would have gotten on my website, let alone how I would have ranked for it. And that means that all the things I was actually putting time and effort into trying to rank for it, clearly wasn’t working. So I hired Hayley.
I’m going to put her information in the show notes. She’s wonderful in the SEO audit was phenomenal. So if you know that something you need, check out the show notes and you can get her information, but that SEO audit, whether she does it, whether someone else does it, whether you do it yourself, that was so informational for me, for finding keywords that I could build content around an SEO is so important.
I know we all know how important SEO is it just getting people. Come to you organically from Google because of keywords you’re using in content that you’re already doing anyways. It’s just such a great bonus. And to me, it feels like a way you can bring in traffic without A paying for it or B having to hustle so hard for it because sometimes, you know, content feels like a hustle.
And even though this comes from your content, it feels different to me. I don’t know. Anyways, that’s not really the point. The point is an SEO audit. Is a great place to get content inspiration? The fourth place is I like to actually look at what I’ve already put out there and then look for holes. So for example, when I was leading up to my next launch, I knew I wanted to talk about content, but I don’t know about you. I have a hard time remembering all of the episodes that I’ve put out. I mean, this is episode what, 69, 69 different episodes. It’s hard to remember what exactly I’ve talked about and what I haven’t. So I actually went through my entire editorial calendar because I keep it all in Trello. And I said, okay, that was a content episode. And I wrote it. What episode and what the title was, that was a content episode. And I just wrote a list of all the different content episodes side by side. And I was able to say, “oh! This is a hole that I could talk about.” And I don’t know about you, but when you’re talking about something so much, you kind of feel like you’ve said it all at some point and you probably have, but I realized there are definitely holes specifically within my podcast lineup about content, content marketing content batching. And I was able to do that simply by just writing out what I’d already done, printed it all in the list side by side and saying, where are the holes? So that’s another way, especially when you’re going to launch something you’ve already launched before. That’s a great way to get more content ideas for it.
On the flip side of that, if you have a specific topic and you’re not really sure what to say about it, but you know, you want to talk about, let’s say you want to talk about, to do lists and you’re like, I want to do an episode on to-do lists, but I don’t know what to say about to-do lists. I don’t know what people are asking about to do list.
What you can do is you can open up Google and Pinterest and you can just type to do list in the search bar. And it will, auto-populate different ideas. We’ve all done this before, right where we’ve started typing something into Google and it gives you suggestions. Look at those suggestions and see what other people have been asking.
See what comes up from those suggestions, because the algorithm gets those suggestions based on what other people are Googling. So that’s a great way if you’re like, I have a topic, but I don’t know what direction I want to take this topic in. You can pop it into Google or Pinterest. They both do it. In fact, if you do it both, that’ll give you a wider range, probably. But pop it into one of those and see what comes up and see if that inspires you. Or maybe even if you don’t like any of those suggestions that makes you think of something else, and you can try that. And it’s a great way to come up with different ideas.
Now the sixth way that I get content inspiration is looking at most downloaded past episodes. So I’ll go into my podcast hosts. I use blueberry. I go into my podcast hosts. I look at my statistics and I say, “Hmm, this episode did really, really, really well. What other topics can I brainstorm around that topic that I could do a whole episode on? Because people love this one. So they will probably like this and this and this and this.” And then you can see which one feels best, which one you have the most for. Or you could take it to your Instagram stories and double layer.
It there’s a lot you can do with that. But getting inspiration from past downloads is another great way actually, to listen to what your audience actually wants. And then finally my seventh way to find content inspiration is my content bank Trello board. So I have a Trello board. If you’re a club content, batching student, you know those, you’ve got this bonus.
You better have one too. But this, this is a board where I literally just. Content ideas. So anytime I’m out walking and a random idea comes to me, I put it in the board. Anytime I get asked questions, anytime I find inspiration for questions that were asked to me, anytime I’m scrolling along on social media, and I think, oh, I have a take on that. I can pop it into that anytime, anywhere that I get content inspiration, but it’s not time to create content. I just pop it into this copy bank. Then, when it’s time to sit down and plan out what my content is actually going to be. I have a running list that I can go ahead and pull from and start from. Now, there are definitely times where I go back into that board. And like, that idea was terrible. Just delete that, but it’s a great starting point. And eventually you end up with so many that you, anytime you need content ideas, it’s there and you can just pull from it.
And frankly, a lot of times before I started using this. It wasn’t that I didn’t have enough places to grab content inspiration. I was just so overwhelmed when it actually came time to plan out what my content should be, because I would go blank. When in reality, I was constantly gathering these ideas, I would just forget them. So this way, I don’t forget those ideas during the rest of the month when I’m not creating my content. And when it does come time to plan it out, I can just go back and say, oh, I had this idea this month, this idea, this month, this idea this month, which do I want to do?
So I highly encourage you to create your own. Content bank, Trello board, Asana board, whatever, Click Up, whatever you use, have some space where you can write down all these random content, inspiration ideas so that you’re never running out of ideas for what to say. And you’re never running out of inspiration for content.
If you would like to get a really great headstart and filling up that board, I would love it. If you would come join my content ideas challenge, it’s called the Content Generator and it is a five day challenge to amp up your content, ideas and inspiration. You will walk away with over 50 ideas for what you can say to your audience.
This copy bank would be a great place for you to put it. So if you want to start filling up that content bank that you’ve created head on over to Amanda warfield.com/challenge, I would love to see you at the Content Generator. It is going to be such a fun five day event. I’m going to go live every single day inside the Facebook group. And I would love to see you there again. That was Amandawarfield.com/challenge.
And this week’s book recommendation is Beach Read by Emily Henry. And this is a very quick paced fiction, short a beach read, essentially. And it was so stinking. Cute. I have obviously, as someone who reads a lot, I’ve always been fascinated by authors and the writing process. This story centers around two authors that they knew each other in college. And then they ended up surprisingly being neighbors. And one of them writes really dark edgy stuff. And the other one writes really light fluffy beach reads, and they challenge each other. They’re both feeling stuck and uninspired.
And so they challenge each other to write in each other’s genres. And it’s just a really cute light-hearted read. If you one need a beach read or two, you’re also just a book nerd like me, and you’re interested in the whole writing process. You would really love this book. And until next time, my friends, I hope that you will go out and uncomplicate your life and biz.
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