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I know that as a business owner, coming up with content ideas – and then getting around to creating and publishing the content – is often something you feel you should be doing better at, but there is always something demanding your attention isn’t there? So content gets pushed further and further down the pile and what happens for a lot of business owners is that they tend to just push out what I call ‘snack’ content – a quote or a quick little video. But that ‘snackable’ content doesn’t do the same thing as longer-form content: it won’t help you get found and it certainly doesn’t drive your audience to take action.

Create Content with Longevity

Content that helps drive search engine optimisation (SEO), that serves your audience and shows them you can really help solve their problem is what I like to call ‘meal’ content. There’s the snack content that you’ll pop out there that is the shorter form type of content that you might produce on the fly. Your Instagram stories, quick little video, maybe your quote, and then there’s the meal content, and this is the type of thing that you want to be making sure you’re producing consistently. Doing this will help you meet your customers where they’re at, and move them to where they want to be. This type of content also has longevity and helps to build your portfolio of knowledge and expertise. 

This is the type of content that helped me to get myself out there when I first started my business, which helped people see that I knew what I was talking about and that I understood marketing. It helped to give people value ahead of time before they even started working with me, and it’s something that I’ve continued to do throughout my business, firstly with my blog, and then moving and introducing my podcast.

This is what helped attract people to come and work with me and it got me to making six and multi-six figures in my business. For you, this might be starting out with a blog on your website, then perhaps you might be looking at starting a podcast, especially when you are looking at growing your reach and you have more capacity to serve people, maybe through a more leveraged offer, like an online course.

How to ensure your content ideas are strategic

So many business owners create content on the fly, and it’s not getting to the heart of what it is that they can help people with, or driving their audience to take action.

The key things you need to answer when coming up with content ideas are:

• What message am I trying to communicate here? What are the key points I need to touch on?
• How is this relating back to how I can help someone? How does this tie back to one of the offers I actually sell?

When you do this you help to show people that you are the expert and you are meeting your audience where they’re at and helping move people to the step ahead where they want to be.

But let’s be honest! Creating content isn’t super sexy or exciting. And it’s not necessarily easy, but it can be simple and often we procrastinate on the things that are simple because it feels as though we should be doing something that’s more complicated, such as creating a more sophisticated funnel, or jumping on the latest social media platform, or creating another offering.

But if we are honest with ourselves, we know that we could be doing more when it comes to our content if we’re not already creating one piece of monthly, fortnightly or weekly longer-form, valuable piece of content.

Which leads to the question – what should I share?!

I recently a content creation session in my membership, The Modern Marketing Collective, because I recognise it can be a challenge to carve out that time to do the strategic thinking around coming up with content ideas. So I’m gonna share with you a couple of the activities that we did, and these are just a few of the ways that you can come up with content ideas for your own business.

Conversations with customers

When I run business retreats for my members, I barely sleep at night, which as you can imagine isn’t ideal, but it happens every time because I’m surrounded by the people that I love to work with. I’m surrounded by the most amazing, inspirational women, who are my members in my membership, and I get to hear firsthand and in person what it is that they’re struggling with or their goals and dreams for their businesses.

Many times, I might be aware of these, but I’ve never heard them expressed in that particular way. And so I lie in bed at night during my retreats thinking about how can I solve that? How can I explain this even better? How can I create a resource or a training or some, way to help my members with this?

This also happens during my coaching calls, and this might be the same for you when you are having your meetings with your clients or you’re running a strategy session or you’re doing an onboarding call, you will no doubt learn so much from your current or potential customers.

The next part of this is that I have a new customer survey, which asks my new members about where their business is at currently and where they want to be. I export these answers into a Google Sheet, sorted into categories such as ‘Challenges’ and ‘Desires’ so I have a quick and easy bank of my customers needs and wants to then create helpful content around.

Through conversations with – and surveys for – my customers, I’m able to generate so many different content ideas, that I actually know will resonate with the exact type of people I want to reach and help.

Repurpose content like a pro

Here’s the truth: you do not have to reinvent the wheel. There is so much content out there, and if you feel as though you can’t talk about something that’s already been covered, it’s going to be very challenging for you! So you have total permission to talk about things and topics that other people are talking about. You even have permission to talk about things you’ve already talked about in the past.

I challenge you to look back on maybe a social media post or a blog post that you shared last year. Then look at a different angle or a different way that you can tap into that type of content, that same theme or that same topic, and talk about it again.

Don’t forget that your audience don’t see everything you share. And, as humans, we need reminders! We need to see and read things more than once for them to really sink in and for us to action them.

There are always going to be people in your industry talking about similar things to you or that you would like to talk about.

No one owns a certain topic: you are allowed to talk about things that other people are talking about.

Have a look at podcast feeds, or Youtube videos or blog feeds of others in your industry. No doubt you’ll realise that there are so many topics that you haven’t talked about before, or for a long time. Perhaps there are things you disagree on, or that you know you could explain in a simpler way with your own process. Put your own spin on it and you will never run out of content.

Headline mining for content ideas

Look at some of the different headlines you see pop up. Again, this might be on podcast episodes, blogs, post titles, YouTube videos – but this doesn’t have to be restricted to your industry. You can even Google different headlines or headline ideas and see what pops up there. Then, rewrite those headlines for your own content themes that you talk about in your business that relate back to the things that you sell and the things that you help your clients or your students with.

For example, you might see a headline that reads: “How to lose weight without spending all your day in the gym” and you can change this format – how to “x” without “y” for your business. Such as “How to train your puppy without giving them endless treats”.

Another format is lists. People love to read lists! How can you create a list of ‘5 ways to’ or ‘6 of the best’?

Another is case studies, such as “what happened when I…”

Yours might become “What happened when I, posted on Instagram every day for a month” or “What happened when I tracked my money every day for a week?” or “What happened when I meditated for every day for January”.

I love to see what headlines stand out to me and make me want to read or watch the content! Then I switch them up for my business.

Identify headline the format, and flip it for your business.

These are three simple ways to continuously find different ideas to create really valuable, longer-form content in your business: the kind of content that showcases your expertise, shows your audience that you understand them and demonstrates you have the solutions that will help.

So – without further ado, go you good thing! Dive in and start creating some incredible content for your business.

Looking to build a stronger connection with your audience? You’ll love my free Audience Connection guide. Download here.