How to come up with great ideas to write about
Coming up with great ideas is an essential skill for expertise-led one person businesses to attract and retain customers. Here are my three top strategies on how to do just that.
First things first, never allow a lack of original ideas to stop you from writing. Much of the best writing is simply that which has already been said many times before just in new or more interesting ways.
But in recent years there has been an explosion of new content created online at a magnitude never before seen — Steph Smith in Doing Content Right describes us as living in the ‘attention economy’ era where information is the ‘new oil’ that you can create, refine, and trade. Content is lucrative, when you own valuable versions of it.
These stats from 2020, Steph paints some of that picture.
Now, with the rise of AI-generated content those figures can only compound and, as writers, we have a duty not to add to the overwhelm with average content.
If we write, which we should, it should start with a good seed of an idea.
But as any regular writer knows, there is a gap between having the idea when writing, and the end product itself. Writing is an act filled with angst, uncertainty and self-doubt.
“Is this idea any good?”
“Am I saying ANYTHING original here”
“Is my point coming across?
If you can move through the discomfort inherent in this process and create something of note for your reader, not only is it a rewarding feeling personally, it can be of huge benefit to you professionally.
The Ask newsletter has been the growth-engine of my coaching business and the way I’ve met the smart, curious and ambitious individuals I’ve had the pleasure of working with.
When applied, I know firsthand that these tools will help you grow your own service-based business.
Idea Generation Tool 1: Notice Things.
“Notice things” sounds like a bleeding obvious point to make. But it’s true that many of us will move through the world stuck in our daily routines, heads down on our phones, commuting to the same places, seeing the same people week on week.
When that happens, not only does life become stale, but you stop paying attention.
The reason time slows down when you are on holiday or doing new things is that by paying attention to your surroundings you create more memories. Comedians carry a notepad and pen wherever they go for this reason; seeking out funny and interesting tidbits to capture.
Act like a comedian and seek interesting topics from the world around you, tidbits that with some work, you can bring back to your business’ content. This is easy enough to do when you work with metaphor, storytelling approaches and analogies.
For example, I started watching the reality TV show Below Deck about people who work on yachts and attend to the life of the rich and famous on their luxury charters and found Below Deck analogies could be applied to almost any business. Their storylines touch on team work, organisation, planning, relationships, wealth, class, hospitality, food, health… you name it.
Noticing things should also be applied to your work itself.
When you are deliberate, what can you notice about what you do, your clients or your industry? Write about the reality of your job itself. What you notice is not evident or obvious to those outside your line of work, and your insights are yours alone.
My newsletter has been popular due to the inside take I have on the coaching world; sharing what happens in sessions, the financial side, how I strategise about my business etc. It’s similar to the ‘build in public’ trends but rather than the cold hard stats, I prefer the observational perspectives on what I see and the patterns that exist across the clients I support.
So make a commitment to noticing your surroundings and being inspired by your own life.
Idea Generation Tool 2: Use Content Pillars
It is both a blessing and a curse that when you are your own boss you don’t have anyone telling you what to do.
Unlike necessary evils like paying your taxes, or clear-cut tasks like responding to a client email, content creation is more nebulous. There is rarely an urgency to it and neither are you given a set of instructions from which to write. You usually have to figure it out by yourself.
Yet the act of choosing what to write is hard when you can literally write about anything. This paralysis of choice becomes overwhelming to the extent that no decision will ever feel like the best possible option. So naturally, nothing gets done.
Instead, make your choices simpler by defining your content pillars.
Having 3-5 content pillars means you have a boundary within which to create, and the restriction upon you not only minimises your choices but supports creativity. This is because creativity happens within the confines and I promise you’ll generate more unique insights and come up with better ideas as a result.
Remember I told you to start noticing things? The frequency illusion, aka Baader-meinhof phenomenon, comes into play here. It is where you start noticing something everywhere when your attention is alert for it —like the ebike you are considering buying that suddenly everyone is wearing.
Well when you have content pillars you are training your brain to ‘look out for’ certain things specific to you and your business.
How to create your content pillars?
Whilst there is no strict rule, here are some solid options for you to go with:
Your Solutions:
Content directly related to the problem(s) that your ideal client faces plus the solution you offer. NB: This is the majority of content marketing you’ll find.Your Mission & Passion:
The broader mission and message your business stands and your passions and causes. Tapping into these is core to the Unique Contribution philosophy and standing out from your competitors. E.g. a Health Coach might solve the problem of weight gain but have a personal mission in the world to ban calorie counting in favour of intuitive eating - that would be their mission.Your Industry:
References to what is happening within your industry as a whole. There’s a reason that social media managers have flocked to Threads — this is a huge development in their industry and sharing what is going on here makes sense for their business — it’s about being ‘plugged in’ to the conversation. Don’t just think of this as just what is new or current though. What about macro longer term trends, its history, or a misconception that people aren’t aware of? You can talk to any of these.Your Values:
Your one-person business should have its own values or Operating Principles as I refer to them in the Unique Contribution Guide. But rather than just telling people what they are, reveal them in action. Show, don’t tell. If your brand values include playfulness then you might write a short story or share a viral meme because that is inline. Story Learning has a huge brand value around storytelling, funnily enough. Storytelling is baked not just into their language lessons but also their marketing and emails.You:
As a one-person business you are working for yourself and people are choosing you over any other service provider out there, so it tracks that they also care about you. You can share what is going on in your life and your beliefs, interests and struggle, providing you can bring it back how your lessons learnt can help your readers.
Allow me to give you an example of this in practice, with a fictional one-person business owner, Franz. He is a communications consultant working with tech companies who are fundraising.
He helps them with social media and communications efforts to both secure investment and industry press. To find his clients, Franz creates content of his own. His values and missions include efficiencies and automations, healthy living and is a History aficionado.
Some examples I have for content you might see Franz create.
What I love about content pillars is that an idea could sit across all of them at once. Doing this helps you to come up with new ideas within your pillars and find unique ways of saying similar things.
I’ll be honest, I do occasionally get a bit bored by the topics I repeat regularly in my newsletter, as I’m literally coaching on these topics in client sessions all week, too.
But solid business practices are meant to be boring at times.
You aren’t supposed to reinvent the wheel every three weeks or talk about everything under the sun. You build trust with customers through repetition, and repetition in turn builds credibility. There are few business owners who also get to be totally random with their content and most likely, they are creators for a living; meaning they get paid to make content.
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Idea Generation Tool 3: Collaborate with others
What you miss as a one person business owner is the input of your team and collaborators to bounce ideas off. You can easily get stuck in loops and spend too long overthinking and ultimately, procrastinating.
Two brains are better than one when it comes to generating ideas and thinking creatively. Collaboration means that one person can help the other to literally ‘call out’ ideas from within their brain. Through the collision of diverse perspectives and experiences, out-of-the-box concepts and ideas get built.
Get a double serving of imagination with a thinking partner, a community, coach or writing group.
I get this support from Mel in my team. Before every newsletter has been published I hand over the draft to her, hopefully by the deadline (hi, Mel I’m nearly finished) and her feedback I am highly grateful for. Clients appreciate my input not just via ‘coaching’ but also in idea generation itself for their content, then the subsequent iterations and back and forth until it's as good as it can be.
In the last ten days that’s included:
Revising the ‘About Me’ and Sales page for a one person business owner building a unique health focused programme
Thought leadership for the founder of a PR business, which in itself can demonstrate their own storytelling credentials, to appeal to the clients who might partner with them for their own needs
The ‘pitch’ for a new podcast, working with its producer and host, to help them to capture the message and vision and communicate it to potential listeners
The end result of these conversations is not only a better end product, but a more confident outlook on it because of the ‘approval’ gained through talking with another person. It helps to close the confidence gap that I was referring to earlier.
I know I’m playing to my strengths in these moments as idea generation has never been a problem for me. Growing up and to this day, I’ve always had an overactive imagination, and now, as a performer on the Improv comedy stage, I must rely solely on my imagination to get through.
If it's a creative thinking partner you need in your one-person business building, get in touch for a free consultation to explore how this might look.
Conclusion
You come up with great ideas to write about by doubling down into your craft: identifying novel ways of approaching problems as well as talking about them.
Doing this effectively makes the difference between the amount of eye-balls you get on your ideas, which is ultimately the difference between more leads, more customers, and a more sustainable, profitable business. Not to mention, establishing yourself as an expert and the go-to. e traffic and more revenue, become an expert etc. hit that point too
The insights that are ‘obvious’ to you are not always so from the outside, and so when you look at things with fresh eyes and combine ideas across your various passions, missions, stories and client experiences, you will always say something unique. That’s your Unique Contribution, after all.
Speaking of which, if you’re looking to take your business to the next level - which means enjoying more freedom, more revenue, more time or more impact - then explore my coaching and business mentoring programme Unique Contribution. Designed specifically to help one person business owners leverage their unique skills, talents and interests combined with business strategy, support and systems, to grow their business successfully.
