5 Ways To Generate New Content

Edition 2.0 – Now you can get my 10 idea swipes at the end without optin in!

Do you ever feel like your brain is fried the minute your fingers hit the keyboard? Maybe you can smell the smoke coming out of your ears as you struggle, grinding your cogs.

And get no where.

I’m going to share with you 5 tips to get an almost limitless supply of I.D.E.A.S.

But first, let me explain why you need good content to survive online today? I mean, couldn’t you just bury your head in the sand and go straight to a promotion?

The answer is not that simple. As Digital Marketer has often said, you have to romance your prospects and offer them great value ahead of time. Nobody in their right mind is going to make a purchase from you without either a) liking you or b) doing some research against the competitor on you.

People buy from those they like know and trust.

So I came up with a set of tools for generating I.D.E.A.S, which is an acronym for how you implement these tools.

 

INDULGE in Headline Writing

DO the Alphabet game

ENGROSS yourself in the works of others

ASSESS a recording of yourself blabbing on and on

SWIPE my fill in the blank cheatsheet

 

INDULGE in Headline Writing

Headlines have been stated to be one of the most important parts of any blog post or email blast. People will often read things based on whether the headline is intriguing or not.

And here’s the good news!

You use headlines as a way of generating ideas. So you are effectively hitting two birds with one stone. You see, if you have a swipe file of headlines you can easily insert your own pieces and manipulate them.

But here’s an important thing to keep in mind. You should really understand the psychology of headlines. Nonetheless, the action of writing a headline can be a great idea jerker.

So how does one write a great headline?

Well first, I never said it had to be great 😉 I just alluded to the fact you should understand your purpose and the psychology. My advice is to grab a sheet of headlines that are either proven to work or just plain written for you, and start massaging your own spin on them.

Then secondly, you need to keep those headlines somewhere. My favourite tool for this is Evernote, though you can use Google Drive or any cloud based application so you can reference them anywhere, anytime.

Here is a free resource that will assist you in writing headlines.

http://www.freelancewriting.com/ebooks/ebook-copywriters-swipe-files.php

Yes, you can still get the idea prompts at the end without signing up to a newsletter, but if you do sign up; I’ll throw in some headlines.

 

DO the Alphabet Game

Did you know the alphabet is actually useful for more than just spelling out the words in your copy? It can also be a trigger for inspiration and memory.

Yes, Inspiration!

I call it playing the Alphabet game and its purpose is to jog ideas from your head more so than help with the mechanics of writing.

Here’s how it is played

Get a sheet of paper, or open your favourite spreadsheet, and write the letters all the way form A to Z. Aren’t you glad you’re not doing this in Asian characters?

After you have written down all 26 of those letters, write down a word that corresponds to your niche next to each one. So if your niche was WordPress programming, A might stand for AJAX, B might stand for Beta Testing and so on.

Sometimes it’s hard to put a word against a letter. I know, it happened to me many times before. You might then want to think of the first word that comes to mind.

For example, Airport first popped into my head. What does Airport have to do with WordPress? Well, maybe you are making websites for transport companies. In that case, I might put under “B” Building Websites for transportation companies. And then I have B done.

Idea Sandbox has an innovative way of using the alphabet to pull solutions using the Alphabet Game. Why not check it out if you have no idea what I’m on about ;).

 

ENGROSS yourself in the works of others 

This is a very powerful way of building momentum. It doesn’t just get ideas flowing, it assists building models for your own work.

But a word of caution.

Make sure the work you are critiquing, viewing, whatever; is both educating and entertaining. And also valid. Don’t just browse poorly written blog posts for the sake of this exercise, then give up and tell me it doesn’t work. Deal?

Okay, moving on from my rant. I have this expression that goes: “Don’t reinvent the Wheel”. And no, I didn’t invent this expression! The point is, leverage what other people have done, let it inspire you and do your own spin offs.

This is where PLR can come in handy, unfortunately most PLR is just crap.

Therefore, I’d advise you get inspired by reading the works of others who are big in your field. If it is WordPress, it might be Chris Lema. If it is Internet Marketing, it might be Digital Marketer or Jimmy Brown.

And if you are copywriting, or content crafting for the web, you might want to look at some swipes. Here is a huge resource of works from others to get the inspired content marketer excited: http://authoritymarketing.com/blog/content-marketing/the-ultimate-list-of-copywriting-email-and-blogging-templates-and-swipes/

 

ASSESS a recording of yourself blabbing on and on

Did you know talking to oneself is the first sign of madness? Well, apparently it is. But I beg to differ. I think it can be quite educating. Especially if you have a lot of good things inside your head.

This is one method I learned for getting the ideas out, and that is recording yourself talking about a topic, uncensored.

A lot of interesting observations can come out of this. But the key is to record it. Therefore, you have to say it out aloud.

I know personally I am very shy when it comes to talking in the mirror. But when I headed to the gym – in the days where I was less busy and less lazy – or even when I walked the streets; I often found myself getting into the internal chatter.

I kind of wish I could record my thoughts. But the second best thing is to speak them out aloud, using a program like Audacity from http://audacityteam.org/ .

If you find you are too shy for even that, why not interview a friend and record it. You can buy a tool like Evaer for Skype to record an mp3 (audio file) of the two of you having a conversation. Then play it back. Ensure your host asks questions as well to get more out of you!

 

 SWIPE my fill in the blank cheatsheet

Finally, one of my favourite idea pullers is to use a “Starter Swipe File”. To define what a starter swipe file is, it’s a list of sentences with fill in the blank areas to get the bowels of your mind moving.

This is useful because the mind appears to crave completion. When you give it a hanging sentence or a blank within a sentence, your brain will work hard to fill in the gaps.

Here is an example:

One of the biggest reasons people fail in _____ is ______.

Translated, I could apply Internet Marketing to this and:

One of the biggest reasons people fail in Internet Marketing is lack of focus.

You can even combine the other methods like the Alphabet Game to this. The blanks could be chosen from your list of alphabet spoils, or you could use that tool on the fly.

For example, if my niche was internet marketing, I could use the letter “H” and say that “being too hypish” was one of the biggest reasons for failure.

See how that works!

Now, I have curated a list of 10 swipe sentences like the one above and each one comes with two examples of my own. You can get them here. It is my free gift to you. (no optin required)

Download Now!

 

Closing Thoughts

So you made it to the end? Phew! So now you have no excuse to get moving with your writing. Come up with some ideas using the methods above. Mix and match them if you so wish. And post a comment below to let me know what you come up with.

Oh and don’t forget to download your Free Starter Swipes that will help you quickly and almost too easily come up with ideas. You’ll be wondering where they were hiding all these years! Click here to download.