How To Generate 50 Content Ideas In Less Than 30 Minutes

Your brain generates about 6,200 different thoughts a day and has 100 trillion neural connections.

Do you still think you have no ideas?

The hard pill to swallow: The lack of ideas is not the problem. In fact, your brain is full ideas, but the amount of overwhelm they create is the problem that paralyzes your creativity.

And that’s pretty natural — when you go to the store for a chocolate, and there are 120 different types, brands & flavours, you’ll either need to wash your brain off to decide which one to buy, or you’ll make no decision at all.

On the other hand, if you went to a store with 5–10 types of good chocolate, choosing 1 would be much easier.

Whenever you feel like you have nothing to write about, the key is to limit the amount of possible choices you can make.

In other words, set constraints — that’s what this technique is all about.

Let’s take a dive.

You’ll need 3 things:

1. Pen

2. Notebook

3. 30 min of focus time

No jokes. The technique is bloody simple.

The smallest constraint you can create:

Brainstorm the topics you want to write about.

No big deal — at least for most people.

If you’re not so sure what you want to write about, ask yourself: What is something I am quite knowledgeable about today, but knew nothing about a few years ago?

The answer(s) is/are your topic(s).

Alrighty — so we’ve set the basic constraint of all. Chances are that you still don’t have any ideas though.

So let’s create further constraints:

For each topic, brainstorm words or terms that come to your mind when you hear them. You don’t need to wash your brain off — just first 5–10 terms.

I’ll give example from my process:

Topic:- Writing

- Words/Terms:

- headlines

- formatting

- flow state

- language

- value

- sharing

- analytics

- introduction

- main points

- takeaways.

And I had a plenty of these for other topics as well.

And now, those ideas are becoming pretty clear. Here’s what I came up with:

How To Write Compelling Headlines.

How To Have A Proper Formatting.

Words To Power Your Writing.

How To Provide Value.

How To Write Content People Will Inevatibly share.

How To Use Analytics To Write Engaging Your Posts.

“But what if nothing hasn’t clicked yet?”

I got you — we’ll use this little hack I’ve learned from the digital writing GOAT: Nicolas Cole.

Realize that all non-fiction writing can fall into one of these 4 categories:

Actionable — How To Do X

Aspirational — You Can Do X

Analytical — The Breakdown Of X

Anthropological — Why Are Things The X Way

Tell yourself you want to create 1 in each.

If we go back to my examples— let’s take the word “headline”. Now let’s see how we can make a post on it in all of these categories:

How To Write A Good Headline?

You Can Go Viral If You Write Headlines Like This

15 Headlines That Helped Posts To Go Viral

Why People Don’t Click On Your Headlines

See?

From 1 term, we’ve created 4 different pieces. Great job!

There is one problem with this technique no one talks about though.

Hundreds, if not thousands of people before you have probably created the same post, with the same advice.

The question is: How can you be different? What can you add to the conversation people haven’t read before?

Do a little research: Search your idea on Google, YouTube, Medium or Twitter, and notice patterns: What words do people use? What headline styles? What points do they make? These are exactly the things you DON’T want to mention when writing.

Don’t get me wrong — when I click on search for “How To Get A Lot Of Ideas” and I read the article where the first point is “Go for a walk”, I’m closing it. Even my grandma can tell me to go for a walk if I lack ideas.

How not to be like everyone’s grandma?

If you feel confident enough, you can create your own frameworks. Or share an opinion that goes againts conventional wisdom. Or invent your own names for the problems & solutions. Or add your own perspective. Or, adding into the headline something that isn’t often mentioned in these types of article. Again, let’s use my examples:

How To Write Good Headlines (That Don’t Sound Like Hundreds Of Other Headlines People Have Written).

How To Improve Your Formatting To Make Your Writing Easy To Read & More Engaging.

10 Powerful Words, Idioms & Metaphors To Use If You Don’t Want To Sound Like Thousands Of Other Boring Writers.

How To So Much Value That People Will Start Paying You Money Without You Even Asking Them To Do So.

The point is: Notice what most of the articles covering your idea focus on, and shift that focus onto something else.

To put it simply: Provide value — but not in a way hundreds or thousands of other boring writers do.

Now, let’s do the math:

Let’s say you have 3 topics to write about.

For each topic, you brainstorm 5 terms. For each term, you have 4 content ideas. 13x5x4 = 60.

Now, let’s say you publish 2x a week.

This way, you have ideas for 30 weeks in advance, generated in just 30 minutes. Powerful, huh?

So take a pen and paper, and start brainstorming!