Girl Means Business

How To Create a Never-Ending List of Content Ideas For Your Business

• Kendra Swalls • Episode 242

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Coming up with new content ideas can feel like a never-ending hamster wheel that always ends in frustration. This week I answering a listener question and breaking now my step-by-step plan for always having fresh content ideas for my business.

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Speaker 1:

Hey there and welcome to the Girl Means Business podcast, the show where we're all about helping you feel confident, both as a mom and a business owner. I'm your host, kendra Swalls, mom of two, former teacher and full-time photographer and business coach. Each week we'll discuss the challenges, success and secrets that make you say I can do this, because you absolutely can. So pop in those earbuds, grab your favorite snack and let's get ready, because this girl means business. Hey there and welcome back to the Girl Means Business podcast. This week we are doing a listener question episode, which I love doing and I love, love, love when y'all send me your questions. So before we dive into this week's question, I want to remind you that if you want me to answer your business questions, there's two ways you can get that done. One is you can head down to the show notes and click on the ask me anything link. That will take you to a Google form you can fill out, where you add in your question and then it could be the next question we answer here on the podcast. Now, if you are a photographer and you are looking for one-on-one help with your business, you have tons of questions about business and marketing and planning and strategy and all the things and you're like I just need somebody to help me. Then I have a membership program perfect for you. The Focus Photographer Lab is a monthly membership where you get access to a community of other incredible photographers. You get a resource hub full of classes and courses and templates and all kinds of things to help you with your business. You get monthly live trainings and then we also have these really fun, amazing weekly office hour sessions. Office hours are 30 minute one-on-one coaching calls that you can sign up for each and every single week and you get one-on-one personalized coaching for your business. You get all of that for $47 a month. Now if you're one of those people like me who's like I kind of need to like see how things go before I commit, you actually can get 14 days for free. That means you can sign up right now. You can get two weeks of one-on-one coaching calls in those office hour sessions. You can check out the resource hub. You can hop into the community. You can do all of the things you want to do for two weeks, see if it's a good fit for you and then decide if you want to stick around and if it's not a fit for you. You can cancel at any time. You can learn more about that and get signed up for your free trial at girlmeansbusinesscom slash lab L-A-B or just head down to the show notes and click on the Focus Photographer Lab link down below.

Speaker 1:

This week's question comes from Andrea and she was asking about content. So she said I want to know how you come up with ideas for your social media posts, your podcast episodes, your blogs, everything. I feel like I never have enough things to say to keep it interesting and I end up repeating my the same things over and over again. Help me out. What do you do? This is a great question because this is something I think with the amount of content we are expected to create in our businesses, it can feel like you're constantly having to think of something new and exciting and different and stand out and all the things, and it's a little overwhelming, especially with social media content because it moves so fast, and you feel like you have to have something new to post every single day or every other day or at least a couple times a week to stay relevant, and that can make it seem like you are now just a content creator, when that is not what you signed up for to be as a business owner. So I'm going to walk you through my content creation process, how I come up with ideas and what I do so that I always kind of have things going on and ideas kind of planned out for what I want to talk about in my content. Let's start with how I find the content topics that I want to talk about.

Speaker 1:

There are a couple of different ways that I get ideas for content, and what I do is I have a couple of places where I keep a running list of ideas that I come across. The most common one is my notes app on my phone. I have an entire note that is content ideas, and anytime I hear of a topic or an idea or someone asked me a question or I come across something and I'm like ooh, that's a really cool idea, to like a spin on something or an idea for something, I put it into that notes. Then I take those notes and I go over into my Asana account, which is kind of my home base for everything content, and I start kind of placing it into my core content pieces, which we'll get to those in a second. Let me back up really quick when it comes to ideas for content.

Speaker 1:

It also is really important and you're probably gonna roll your eyes when you hear me say this, because you're like God, kendra, we get it is knowing who your content is for and, specifically, knowing what your niche or your industry is. So let me kind of clarify what I mean by all that Obviously, knowing who your content is for, knowing your ideal client. If you know who your ideal client is like, truly know who that is, when you see something out in the real world that makes you go, ooh, that's something that my ideal client would really latch onto or would really want help with or would really find interesting or inspiring because you know them, think of it like your best friend. So when I'm out in the world and I see something and I go, oh my gosh, my friend would love this. Like it's a sweater, it's totally her style, she would absolutely love this, I take a picture, I send it to her. Or if I'm reading a book and I'm like, oh my gosh, my friend would love this book, it is right up her alley, it is something that she would absolutely find so like can't put down kind of book, I send it to her, I tell her about it.

Speaker 1:

If it's a podcast or a movie or a TV show, or if I hear a funny joke or a funny story, or if I hear something like a song on the radio, I'm constantly kind of like connecting these dots to the content I'm consuming and filtering it through. Who else in my life would find this helpful, interesting, exciting, funny, all the things? And so when you include your ideal client into that sort of sphere of people that you're always sort of looking out for, it becomes a lot easier to filter the content you're consuming through the lens of would this appeal to my ideal client? So that's the first thing. The second thing is really also knowing your niche. So for me, as a marketing coach, I'm always kind of filtering things through the lens of okay, does this fit into the topics of what I really want my audience or what my audience has come to expect from me.

Speaker 1:

A great example of this is one of the podcasts that I listen to kind of religiously every week is well, there's two. One is the podcast and the other one is armchair expert. Both of these talk about topics that I absolutely love, so we'll go with the podcast. They talk about all things, pop culture. So they're gonna be talking about the latest celebrity gossip and news. They're gonna be talking about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. They're gonna be talking about the Grammys. They're gonna be talking about the latest you know, netflix hit show or whatever. Those are topics that I love consuming and I love talking about to people, but it's not something I'm gonna talk about here on this podcast. You're not gonna get three weeks of marketing tips and then an episode randomly thrown in where I talk about celebrity gossip. That is not my niche. So when I'm consuming content out in the world and I'm like, oh, this is fascinating, this is interesting, I also have to filter it through. Does it fit into the niche that I am talking about within my business, the walls of my business? So once you know the audience you're speaking to and the topic that you're speaking on, it makes that list of content ideas so much easier to come up with, because you're able to weed out all the things that don't really matter to your idol client or that don't fit within your niche.

Speaker 1:

The other thing you wanna do is you wanna just start consuming content, but it's this fine balance of you wanna consume but you also wanna create If you over consume and under create, then you're just taking in so much content but you're overwhelmed by the amount of content you're taking in that you are then kind of paralyzed when it comes to creating content on your own. It can also have a negative effect if you over consume, that you then start to create content that is too similar to what everybody else is doing. You start kind of copying or emulating what they're doing, as opposed to leaving space for you to put your own spin on things, your own style onto things. The opposite is that you are under consuming and over creating. If you are under consuming and all you're doing is creating content in kind of this like vacuum space, then you might be creating content that doesn't resonate with your audience because you've lost touch with what your audience actually needs or wants. So it's this Goldilocks approach of you have to consume enough content to be getting ideas, to be aware of what's going on in the world around you, to be aware of what your audience is interested in, but then also having enough space to create the content itself and put your own artistic spin on it.

Speaker 1:

So for me, this is how I approached this whole thing. I told you I have my list of content ideas. So when I'm out in the world listening to podcasts or scrolling social media, watching Netflix at night I can't tell you how many times I've been watching just a random documentary or a TV show or a movie and an idea strikes me, just a phrase, a word, a scene, something, and I just I grabbed my phone, I jot it down. Sometimes it's as simple as like I'll be reading a book and an idea strikes me and I'll put it into my notes. So I'm not necessarily consuming just social media content. I think when you hear people say you need to be consuming content, you immediately go to I need to be scrolling Instagram more. That's not necessarily the best way to consume content. Yes, it's helpful because, again, you're aware of kind of the trends, you're aware of what is going on in the content creation space. But I think it's really helpful actually to find inspiration outside of just social media. There's so many other places to get inspiration from for your content. So, again, you have this ongoing list. You're creating ideas based on things that you're consuming.

Speaker 1:

The other way that I get ideas for my content is like the example of this episode. This was a listener question episode. I am always looking to listen, for what is my audience asking me. It can be in the form of putting up a question box or a poll on your Instagram stories. It could be asking a question on a Facebook group and looking at the responses. It might be sitting on an email and asking people to fill out a survey. It could be that you do a form like I have for listener questions. It could be conversations that you're having with your current audience or your current clients. It could be frequently asked questions that you know your audience are going to ask you. If someone has asked it more than once, it's a frequently asked question. So if you have clients that are constantly coming to you asking questions about the certain process of what you do, then that's a piece of content you can create. There's always like listening for what your ideal client is asking for.

Speaker 1:

If you are thinking I don't have a ton of clients yet, I don't really have an engaged audience yet that's going to answer these question boxes or fill out a survey, the other thing you can do is borrow other people's audiences. So I do this a lot with Facebook groups. I will go into a Facebook group where it's a lot of my ideal audience and I will look at posts where someone has asked a question. Let's say it's one that's a Facebook group for female entrepreneurs and I see that someone goes in there and they are asking a question about do hashtags still matter on social media? Okay, well, if they're asking that question and they're part of my ideal audience, that means that it's probably something that other people are asking as well. I can also go look at the comments and see that a lot of people are like following, following, following. You know those comments they put where. I want to see what the answer to this question is. That means that people are interested in this question.

Speaker 1:

It goes on my content idea list. There's actually a phrase for that. It's called social listening. So you are consuming in a way where you're always kind of leaving your ear to the door, going okay, what are people talking about? What's the? You know what's the questions that are being asked in these groups? What are other people in my industry? Are there people commenting on their content, asking particular questions? So if you see someone else in your industry has posted a topic on social media, you're like, okay, that's a good topic, I could add that to my list. But then you go read the comments and you're like, oh, people have specific questions about that topic. That could also be content ideas for your content as well. So social listening is a really big one. It's about looking at what does my ideal audience, what is my potential client, need or want? What are they asking for? What are they consuming themselves? That could also lend to what I could create in my business as well.

Speaker 1:

Now, once I have my ideas I have my you know iPhone notes app with all of my ideas in there then it's time to turn those ideas into content. Now here is the fun part. One idea on my list can get me eight to 10 pieces of content, and I'm gonna break it down exactly how I do that. But I'm gonna say that one more time. One topic, one little topic on my ideal list can then produce eight to 10 pieces of content. The key here is is that you have to get out of this mindset idea that content is just a social media post. I have talked to a lot of people inside of you know my membership, or just talking to people through conversations or on social media where, when I say, what kind of content are you creating, the first thing they say is well, I post to social media three times a week. Okay, yes, that is definitely a type of content creation, but there are so many other places that you can then add that content or create content for that gets you more visibility. So I'm gonna walk you through the way that I take one idea and turn it into eight to 10 pieces of content.

Speaker 1:

Let's go with the idea that I mentioned on that Facebook post. So, let's say, I've seen that there's someone who asked about do hashtags still matter on social media? I've put it onto my list of. This is a great topic. This is something my audience is interested in. I'm gonna use this to create some content.

Speaker 1:

So then I head over to my Asana board and I start figuring out how to take this topic and turn it into two different types of content, my two types of core or two types of content. The first one is core content and then I have general content. So my core content is my longer form content. So for me it's podcast episode and blog post. These are the ones where the podcast, particularly, is where I'm gonna go into the most detail, the most depth. It's gonna have the most bang for your buck with the content itself. Then I take that podcast episode, I turn it into a blog post Again. It still has a lot of information, it's very value packed, it's got a lot of key points, all the things but it is the core content. Those are the places where this is the content that's probably going to live on the longest in my business. It's going to have the most value packed piece of information to it and is the piece that I want to drive most of my audience back to.

Speaker 1:

So for the topic of the hashtags, I will outline an episode for the podcast around. Do hashtags still matter? Are they still relevant? I will record the podcast, I will take the podcast episode and I will turn it into a blog post that links back to the podcast player or the podcast episode. So those are my two pieces of core content already.

Speaker 1:

Now. Sometimes if the topic is one that I can break up into multiple blog post, I will do that. So I could potentially get one podcast episode, two blog post out of that one topic, depending on kind of how in depth the topic goes. So I could potentially have essentially two, possibly three pieces of core content. Now, from there, I take that core content and I break it up into more general content. So this is the content that is going to have a shorter shelf life. It's not going to live on that long but ultimately, again, it points people back to the core content. So one thing I do here is I put out an email. So if I have done the podcast episode and the blog post about hashtags do they matter on social media, in my weekly email to my email list I'm going to link to either the blog post or the podcast episode. I'm gonna maybe share a little sneak peek or a little snippet, a little preview of what the episode's about or what they're gonna learn, and then I send people back to that episode From there.

Speaker 1:

I will also create, usually an audio clip from the podcast. So I will go in. I use Buzzsprout for my podcast so it automatically will help me create. It allows me, it has the tools in there to allow me to create, like, an audio clip with a graphic from Canva and I can take that audio clip and I can put it onto social media. So I can put it in my Instagram stories, I can turn it into a reel, I can put it onto all the platforms as a video, audio video clip. So that gives me an email and then an audio clip that I can use in multiple places.

Speaker 1:

Then I go into social content, and one I'll kind of put a little asterisk on. This one is I do typically create a Pinterest pin for those as well. I don't know that I consider that as social. I mean it's a social platform to some degree, but it's more of a search engine platform. But that is another piece of content that I will put out. There is, I will put that onto Pinterest, sometimes multiple times, to get it to drive traffic again back to the podcast or the blog post, but then I will create anywhere from three to five social media posts around this topic.

Speaker 1:

So again, if I'm talking about the hashtag idea, I can create a carousel where I use like the hook of do hashtag still matter, and then I give maybe a couple of bullet points in the slides and then at the end I have the call to action to go listen to the podcast or go read the blog post. I can also do a standalone graphic that I can create with. Maybe you know like was the info graphic, or maybe it's just like a quick graphic and I asked people to read the caption and then I can also create a reel and I can create stories around this topic. Driving traffic again to the core content. So, right there, I have a podcast, I have one to two blog posts, I get an audio clip, I get an email, I get the Pinterest pin, I get three to five social media posts all from one topic idea that was on my list.

Speaker 1:

And if I'm doing this once a week then I don't need a ton of different topic ideas. I can talk about the same thing in different ways and I can spread them out. You know, I might not post all three of those social media posts about the hashtags in the same week, but I have them that I can schedule out to maybe do one a week for the next three weeks or the next four weeks. I can talk about it in my stories and then share a link to the Carousel post or to the reel or link to the podcast episode. So the nice thing is, when I go into my Asana account I have kind of all of my content topics sort of mapped out of like okay, in January I hit on these topics in my podcast and here's all the content pieces that were for that one.

Speaker 1:

So when I go to social media, I just schedule out my content for the next month or the next couple of weeks and I'm like, oh, what do I need to be talking about right now? Like, my podcast episode talks about this, but I don't want to like harp on that all week long. I could go back to previous content ideas and go oh, you know what I haven't talked about? You know websites in a while, so I'll grab a graphic, a social media from that and I'll plug it in. And so when I say that I'm getting eight to 10 pieces of content from the one idea, it doesn't mean that I'm like spewing those eight to 10 on everything at the same time. I am going to spread them out a little bit, but it gives me this sort of like library of content that I can go back to. Now I want to make a note really here, quickly here, because it just came to my mind the idea of the Asana board. Now, this could be Trello, nochan, asana, it could be a Google folder, it could be whatever you want it to be, but I do highly recommend that you have a place to keep all the content that you create.

Speaker 1:

And here is why, like I just mentioned a minute ago, you know about going back to like past episodes of the podcast and pulling content from those to share on social media. When you have those moments where you're like, oh, I just feel like I have nothing new to talk about. I feel like that I've just sort of said the same thing over and over again. If you have your old content to go back to and repost your old content, guys, that is one of the secret weapons that every content creator will tell you they have in their arsenal is repurposing content. If you go, look at any content creator that you follow or that you kind of look to and go, oh, they're doing such a great job. Why? How do they always have this content to share? They're not sharing brand new content all the time. They're going back into their history and they're saying, okay, I haven't talked about this in a while and so let's bring it back up.

Speaker 1:

Here's a perfect example Brock Johnson, who is an Instagram expert. He has talked in the past. One of his most popular posts is always about color psychology and the role that colors play in your brand and your messaging. As someone who has worked with him and followed him for a while. I've seen this post come up multiple times in a speed and he has it as a real and he has it as a carousel post. He just recently at the time I'm recording this he just recently posted it again and I recognize the real. I've seen it probably twice before. It does not bother me one bit that I know he's reposted that, and the reason why is because, even though I've seen it before, it was a great reminder. I was like, oh yeah, I need to be really paying attention to like my colors and the things I'm using in my graphics and in my marketing, because those make a difference in the emotions that they convey and they evoke in people. It was a great reminder and I guarantee you that he has a ton of people who have followed him for a while that never saw that post to begin with and he probably has a bunch of new followers who this is brand new information to them.

Speaker 1:

As much as we like to think that people are going to our page and scrolling through our feed and consuming all of our content, they're just not doing that. I don't do that. I don't go onto somebody's feed and scroll back months behind in their content. I may look at the last recent post they've done and then go back to my feed and if they pop in my feed, then I see it and that's great and I will engage with it or I'll move on or whatever. But the fact that we're also worried about repeating the content we've already created. It's okay Repeat the content you've already created. I've done that. I've reposted the exact same content that I shared five or six months ago. Not a single person has called me out on it or cares if they recognize it or not. If someone who has almost a million followers on social media can do it and none of his followers seem to care, then it's okay for you to do it too.

Speaker 1:

Don't feel like you have to reinvent the wheel with this content. If you have content from six months ago that performed really well or that you're like you know what, that's a good reminder. I could reshare that. Reshare it.

Speaker 1:

To answer, hopefully, andrea's question, you need to be looking at the world around you. You need to have this balance of consuming and creating content so that you are getting new ideas, but that you're also putting those ideas into work for your marketing. You need to then take the ideas that you have. Keep your running list, take the ideas that you have and use them to create multiple pieces of content. Take the biggest piece first and then break that apart into smaller pieces and then repurpose your past content. No one is going to care that you are repurposing they probably won't even notice and it can save you a lot of time and sanity when it comes to your content creation.

Speaker 1:

All right, thank you again, andrea, for sitting in your question. I will remind you one more time. If you have a question you want me to talk about here on the podcast, head down to the show notes and click the ask me anything link. That will take you to a Google forum where you can submit your question and I will answer it here on the podcast. I love getting your questions, I love hearing what it is that you are wanting to learn more about, and so please feel free to go fill that out, or you can just send me a DM over on Instagram at girlmeansbusiness. All right, guys, I hope you have a great week, have fun creating some great content and I will see you back here next week. Same time, same place. Thanks again for tuning in to this week's episode. Don't forget to leave a review and follow us on socials at girlmeansbusiness. See you next week.

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