How To Never Run Out Of Content Ideas
In the virtual age that we find ourselves living in today, if we are not creating and putting content out there into the world for others to find and see; our work does not really exist… and in many ways our digital life is just as important as our physical real life.
But it is very challenging, especially if you are a perfectionist to create enough good quality content on a consistent basis across all the multitude of social platforms out there, to grow an audience and take advantage of the opportunities offered to us through utilising these platforms.
So in todays blog I have decided to show you a breakdown of how to never run out of content ideas to post.
We will also go over how to create your own content framework to work from in order to help you have a solid a content creation system that helps you saves time. This way you can remain consistent in posting high quality content.
Step 1: Research
Firstly we need to conduct some audience research to see who our audience is. From that we can create content that is centered around our niche much better. Take some time to write down who your target market is for your content. You do not need to be a business in order to have a target market. You just need to know who you want to connect with, and who you want to attract with your content. If you want to go a little deeper and do some research on your target market, you can use sites like Google Trends to see what people in your demographic are searching for and get some content ideas from there. You could also just use Google and YouTube search and type in your niche and wait to see what the autofill suggests. This will give you a few good ideas around what your target market is likely searching for and will give you an idea of what content to make. You can also go to a site called answerthepublic.com and type in your niche’s keyword into the search bar and search it. You will find a great lot of associated topics you can use to brainstorm content ideas from there.
Step 2: As I have just mentioned: Brainstorm
Now that you have done a sufficient amount of research and have a bunch of keywords, search terms and more with you, you can have a short brainstorming session with yourself and write down as many content ideas as you can think of for 10 minutes and see what you can come up with in that time. This should be ideas of content you want to create, and from those ideas we will move on to the next step which is structuring your content.
After your brainstorm, you should have a bunch of content ideas, if you are wondering which of these ideas are actually any good and worth posting, it may be a good idea to run those content ideas through these simple content qualifying questions:
Is this content educational?
Is this content entertaining?
Will this content save someone time?
Is this content clear and concise?
Is this content inspiring or motivating?
If you replied yes to any of these questions, your content passes the test and can be used. It may not be the best content, but it will serve its purpose. If it’s a no for every single one of these questions however, its best to toss that content idea aside.
Step 3: Create content structures and templates
It is easier to create content if it follows a repeatable structure and flow; then all you need to do is take your idea that you came up with, and fit it into your content template or structure.
Firstly let us focus on creating a few content structures that we can use into the future to create content with relative ease. There are a lot of different structures you can use depending on the type of platform you are planning to post your content too. For example if you are planning to use Instagram and Twitter as your main content posting platforms, your structures may look different for both of the two platforms respectively.
So for this blog I will give you some ideas of structures you can use for Instagram, otherwise if I were to give an example of each platform, this video would be way too long.
For Instagram Carrousel posts you can use the structure:
1: Intro pic/ hook.
2-7: Explication/information/guide of the content you want to share.
8-9: Key take aways and summaries.
10: Call to action.
Or
1: Cover slide/ how to style.
2: Intro to topic.
3-9: Steps involved.
10: CTA.
Or
1: Cover/hook.
2-3: The problem you are discussing.
4-9: The solution/experience/story.
10: CTA.
From these examples you can see that you can create any number of basic structures from this basic format:
1) Create a hook/curiosity.
2) Introduce topic/problem etc.
3) Then share solutions, steps etc.
4) Summarise if need be.
5) Create a call to action.
Not every post is going to need a CTA nor should it; otherwise your audience will very soon get tired of being sold too, and stop following you.
For single posts on Instagram:
You do not have much of a structure as its one post but here are some example ideas of what to post:
Single posts can be tips.
Photos of yourself.
what you are doing.
Or what you are experiencing.
Do not just post another salad photo or a photo of your coffee, be original and show people what you are working on etc. Make sure it adds value, all be it, the caption you write that is the main source of value in your single posts.
Reels:
Can be short tutorials or a video version of the same structure you used in your carousel posts.
They can be on what’s trending now, or in your industry.
They can also just be something entertaining, but remember to stay brand consistent in what you post. If you are posting content about how to become a graphic designer and you randomly post a funny cat video that probably isn’t a good idea, but you know…. cat videos do well on the internet so why not…
Ok so that’s a brief look at how to create a structure for your posts to help you save some time on how you are going to deliver your content.
Now let’s briefly look at creating templates so you can save time and not have to design new posts from scratch every single time you make a post.
If you do not have any designing knowledge that’s ok, there are free alternatives to designing software specifically made for creating social media posts, like Canva. Canva is great in that you are already provided with a bunch of free templates to choose from when creating your social media posts. Here you can choose one of their many templates, make sure that you adjust them to your liking and that they stay true to your brand identity. From your new adjusted templates you can quickly create your posts . For a paid software like adobe and affinity designer, you can create a bunch of templates, save them and access them later and just change some of the text and images for your next posts. Just make sure you create enough templates that all your content does not look the same, otherwise your audience will get bored quickly and it will seem like you are posting the same stuff even if it is different content.
Step 4: redistribution potential.
So now that you have got your ideas in order, you have a structure on how to create your content more quickly and you have a few templates at your disposal, it is a good idea to before creating your content to think of the redistribution potential of your content and how you will go about reposting your content on different platforms.
For example if you are looking to use Instagram as your main platform for posting your content, you could take the text you used in creating your content and from that create a few tweets on the same subject. You may even make a short video of yourself talking about those key points in your post and elaborating on them bit more with some additional examples and ideas and upload that to YouTube or TikTok. This is incredibly powerful as you are essentially creating multiple pieces of content for multiple different platforms without much extra effort on your part, giving you more exposure at less time spent.
It is always good to once you have an idea and your structure to think where else you can repurpose the same content, even if it means taking a bit more time and effort to make sure that it is suitable to each individual platform.
This may sound like a lot of work but if you figure out a system of what channels you want to use, you can easily create multiple forms of content. For example you can write a blog post for your website, use that as a script for a YouTube video, cut that YouTube video into smaller 1 minute clips and use that on TikTok and Instagram, then break down your blog into smaller parts and create a twitlonger from that. You can even repurpose the audio from your YouTube recording and put it on a podcast. All those came from writing one blog post and filming yourself. It sounds complex but you will soon find your own workflow and quick tricks on how to make this process a lot easier and simpler for yourself.
Step 5: Creating your content
Now it’s on to actually making the content that you need to post. When creating content, it may be a good idea to set aside enough time to batch create about a weeks worth of content or more depending on your content schedule and needs, in order to be most effective when you are working on creating your content.
Step 6: Schedule your content
After you have created your posts and are happy with the result, it is time to schedule them for the week ahead. You can use professional paid scheduling sites like hoot suit, or you can use a free alternative to such as later.com . Be aware that after a certain limit, of I think 30 posts a month, you need to pay a subscription, which if you are posting that much I am sure it is worth it to pay for their service, it will save you a lot of time and hassle. A lot of people will actually miss this step, they will create great content and wait for the right time to post it, or life gets in the way and they forget. Then after time some of those posts may not even be relevant to post anymore, so it is very important that you set aside a time in your week to either post the content directly or schedule it.
Step 7: Review your posts
Now the last step in this content creation system, is to review your posts. You can easily view how your content performed on the insights tab of each social media platform. This will be useful to see what resonated with your audience and did well and what didn’t, so you have a better idea of the types of content to focus on creating more of in the future. You can go very deep into analysing your content and what worked, from the message itself, to the style of post you used, to the font type and colours you used and so much more. So take what you can learn from each review and note down those findings. You can then implement those changes into future posts and see if your content improved.
So too summarise, we can rapidly decrease the time we spend on creating content and create content more effectively by having a content creation system we follow. Where we start by doing market research, from there we brainstorm content ideas, from there we use the structures and templates we created from this blog to actually take those content ideas and produce many pieces of content. We will then distribute the content to the many different social media platforms we are going to use in order to effectively repurpose the content. From our finished pieces of content we can schedule them to be posted throughout the week and then we are done.
So that does it for this blog post, I hope you got some value from the it, if you did be sure to also check out my YouTube channel for the video version, if you prefer video content.
Till next blog I will see you all very soon…
Bye Bye friends…
