Never Run Out of Content Ideas Again: Here’s How

Consistently creating AMAZING newsletter content is really hard. 🤦🏻‍♂️

High-value emails are the backbone of keeping your newsletter audience engaged. So you have to keep the bar high, otherwise your database of readers could eventually be worthless.

Like literally worthless. Open rates and click-through rates matter. Without great reader engagement, good luck selling any products or attracting big-dollar brand sponsors.

Now I wouldn’t call myself a prolific writer. In fact I would categorize myself as a fair weather writer. Someone who writes only when the mood strikes. But waiting for inspiration to strike just wasn’t a great content strategy, nor did it make any business sense.

So to take my craft seriously, I had to develop a system to keep the process as dummy-proof as possible.

Here’s my 4-step process for consistently creating high-value newsletters.

Step 1: Discover and Understand the Problems & Challenges of Your Audience

The process and outcome is different depending on what type of newsletter you are running and the value proposition you promised your subscribers.

But the underlying objective is pretty much the same.

Know your audience so deeply that you know what they usually have for breakfast. I’m only half-kidding.

The name of the game at this stage is to know your audience beyond just basic demographics.

• Why did they subscribe?

• What are they hoping your newsletter will solve?

• What specific challenges are they experiencing?

• What transition or major transformation do they envision for themselves?

How do you get these golden nuggets of insight?

Ask your newsletter subscribers - Survey them. Give them a gift card for hopping on a 15min zoom call. Basically, have a conversation with a number of your readers.

Lurk on relevant Subreddits - Reddit is a gold mine for market research. It has a subreddit for almost every topic imaginable. Find the subreddits that are relevant to your audience and see what questions they post. And the discussions that are happening. You’ll get the added bonus of understanding your audience's vocab as well.

Scour Quora - Much like Reddit, Quora is rich with insights. Just start going down the rabbit-hole of Quora to discover the questions, and related topics your audience needs help with.

For example, for the BigCreators newsletter, the main challenges you've shared with me are:

• Building an audience

• Moving your audience from social media to a newsletter list

• Keeping your audience engaged

• Deepening your relationship with your audience with a newsletter or podcast

• Monetizing your audience

• Creating multiple revenue streams

Once you’ve jotted down all the topics your audience needs help with. This will be the basis of the topics you should probably write about.

Knowing what your readers need help with keeps you focused on creating content they actually want to read.

Step 2: Define Your Zone of Genius

Writing becomes less of a chore when you’re excited about the topics. When you zone in on what you’re good at, the content will just come pouring out onto the page.

What’s your zone of genius?

• What are you good at?

• What topics do people ask you for advice?

• What craft have you mastered?

• What makes you credible?

You’re probably good at a cross-section of things. But you’re probably only great at a handful of things.

List them out. No really, write them down.

Now compare your zone of genius list vs the list you came up with in Step 1.

Your resulting list should have about 3-10 topics. The 3-10 topics within this Venn Diagram are the topics you should be writing about in your newsletter.

Step 3: Create an Idea Capture “System”

I don’t know about you, but my content ideas come at such random times.

• When I’m driving

• At church

• In the shower

• 2 seconds before I fall asleep

• When I should be paying attention to what my wife is saying

I was coming up with great ideas with nowhere to document them.

I had to create a way to quickly document these ideas before they faded away into the grey matter of my brain.

Currently, I use this free app called ​Drafts​. It’s this dead-simple app that has zero barriers to jotting something down quickly.

Other tools I’ve used to capture content ideas are:

• Voice memos

• Siri + The Notes App

• ​Notion​

• Emailing myself

The point is, create one easy way to document your content ideas so that you’re not fumbling around looking for a pen to write on your electric bill.

Step 4: Triage, Categorize & Prioritize Your Content Ideas

By this step, you should have at least a dozen or more content ideas that you’ve collected throughout the week.

This is the stage where you triage, categorize and prioritize your content ideas.

Remember that topic list from Step 2? This is where you’re going to be using it.

1. Triage - Turf any ideas that don’t match any topic categories (because it’s probably something your audience wouldn’t be interested in).

2. Categorize - Sort all of your remaining content ideas based on your topic categories

3. Prioritize - Then based on your customer research you conducted, prioritize all these ideas.

Once you’re done this step, you’ll have a list of the most relevant content ideas your audience is dying to read.

Final Thoughts

This process isn't rocket science 🚀

It's simple. As it should be.

The trick to all this is to actually have a process.

Content ideation can be one of the most difficult parts about content creation. Too often, creators just sit in front of a blank page hoping inspiration strikes.

Creating content can be intimidating without a process.

Writing your newsletter doesn’t need to feel like a chore. No more banging your head on your laptop hoping a banger of a newsletter pops out.