How to Come Up With Endless Blog Topics and Ideas
The core exercise that Shortcut Content was built around is a 45 minute outline session that helps you take topics about your business (especially the ones you don’t think are very good) and get them onto paper. After going through this exercise, the end result will be a nearly endless source of topics to blog about.
The outline sheet that we give you contains 64 spaces, which will result in 64 bloggable topics. We’ve found that our customers will often be able to take each topic and dig down even deeper. By going into greater detail, every one of these topics can be split into four smaller pieces. When you only have to write 300-400 words or talk for five minutes about a topic, it is fairly straightforward to break up one seemingly finite idea into several more.
Another effective strategy is to come at your topic from a different angle. For example, we recently spoke with a company that manufactures chocolate. They could easily go through the outline exercise with a focus on their product:
- how it’s created
- what happens in the factory
- how the wrappers are designed
- the taste of the chocolate
- how it stacks up against competitors from big-box stores or grocery stores.
They can then redo the exercise coming from an entirely different point of view. It’s possible to go back to:
- the cacao bean and talk about how and where it is grown
- the harvesting process
- or how it can be grown in a sustainable and socially conscious way
Finally, they can take the approach of using their business to teach entrepreneurship to students. In their local community, they introduce entrepreneurship to middle school and high school students based on how they run the company and help growers. Once a year, they fly high school students to Tanzania to meet growers and learn firsthand how it all works.
By approaching from an entirely different direction and perspective, it’s possible to find endless topics.
Some of these topics can be very similar, but the different point of view is what makes this content unique. Google will appreciate the value of this content since it gives a different take on a similar concept.
The key is just to figure out the different perspectives you can take. The first time through, the exercise can result in topics about how your business is run, or what kinds of solutions you provide to customers’ problems. By taking your employees through the exact same topic exercise, I guarantee that they will come up with many new unique ideas.
In the past, we’ve talked about ways to repurpose blog posts after you’ve written them. You can come full-circle a year or two later by revisiting your most popular posts and rewriting them from scratch, preferably without looking at the old one. If you go through the first 64 ideas and approach them from new directions, you’ll have an endless source of blog topics.