Find yourself staring at a blank page when it comes to coming up with new content ideas? We know how frustrating it can be to brainstorm when you're feeling stuck.
But here's the good news: we've come up with a set process with hooks & tips to make things easy.
To keep things simple — we recommend brainstorming content ideas once a month. That way, you can bulk produce and have plenty of ideas in store.
A great way to make sure you actually sit down once a month is to:
You can brainstorm on a blank page. But if you want to speed up your process, you can sign up for our newsletter and get a free Content Brainstorming Template here. It includes all the hooks and AI prompts you need, but no worries, we also cover those below.
Let's get to it…
Get yourself set up to brainstorm by opening up the following tabs:
Now you can go ahead and start. These are the main questions you want to ask yourself:
Are there:
Want more details and examples of what answering those questions can look like? Continue reading …
Check your (and your team's) work calendar for any events or updates happening next month. They can quickly become an inspiration.
Maybe your manager has just released a new podcast episode, your CEO is attending a major tech conference, or Anne from Accounting is celebrating her birthday soon — all great topics for content. You don't necessarily need to just talk about the actual event, you can use the topic as a source of inspo.
You can even add a prompt to Google or your AI tool for ideas like what events happen in (target market) in (month) every year.
Example: In the first week of May, we wrote a blog post for one of our clients on How to Create a Mother’s Day Card: DIY & Digital using their newest design template. So that this piece of content brought value to their audience — just at the right time.
This is a great way to showcase what you’re actually working on, what goes on behind it — and what value you bring to the table. Projects can be a great thing to cover in your content, but if you're not ready to share it with the world just yet — use the topic of the project as an idea spark or to tease your audience about what might be coming up.
Example: We recently covered a long-term collaboration with our client, Kaleido AI. It was a great way to show what a collaboration with us can look like, strengthen the relationship with the client and also put our successes down on paper.
Just collaborated with another team, agency or company and want to scream it off the rooftops? There’s your next source of content ideas.
By posting about partnerships, you're not just expressing your gratitude. You're also providing your audience with value by connecting them to other amazing people and business owners. This is also a great way to subtly increase the reach of both your posts by tagging relevant stakeholders and companies.
Win-win both ways.
Example:
Sales calls and customer reviews can be a great source of inspiration for content ideas. Brainstorm: What questions are customers asking? Are there any myths in the reviews you can debunk? Do they compare your service or product to other brands?
Creating content around it will help fill that gap and also gives your sales team great ammunition to send relevant content to potential customers if the questions pop up again.
Example: While chatting with a prospect, our client TRIGO noticed a trend. Growing businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to scale when using Microsoft Excel as their choice of software. So the Say it right team wrote a fully fleshed blog post covering some of its alternatives:
Got cute pics roaming around your Slack channel — from your latest office party, working from a beach, office pets or board game night — use them to create some new content. (With everyone's permission, of course.)
If you've gotten this far, you might have a few more random ideas. Create a section on your blank page for those ideas or ones you might want to use at a later stage.
It's always a good idea to keep an eye on your content numbers: reach, likes, comments, organic traffic, most visited webpages and more. We take a look at ours every single month — because numbers don't lie.
If you see something performing well, that's a sure sign to double down on that type of content or use similar tactics in other posts.
Brainstorming new topics every month might seem challenging, but the hardest thing is getting started.
So we thought we'd make it easy for you: we put together a template with the hooks, AI prompts, and ideas we just covered so you can get started in no time.
Sign up for our newsletter and get access to our free Content Brainstorming Template here.