Documenting Your Ideas
In our last section we talked about getting started with content ideas for your business or blog. You were asked to commit to writing down as many ideas as you could think of during a set period of time (e.g. 5-10 minutes), or setting a target (e.g. 10, 20, 50 or 100 blog post ideas) and not stopping until you've reached your target.
I also reminded you that only "thinking" about it only doesn't count. Your ideas must be documented somewhere either physically or electronically.
Here's why this is important:
Whether you plan to write the content yourself or get your content writing outsourced, having your ideas documented helps get your thinking and your content creation planning organized.
This is important, because the truth is, there's no shortage of content ideas you can come up with for growing your business online.
For every topic idea you can think of, I guarantee you that as soon as you actually get started, you will see that there are countless spin-off ideas for related topics that will start coming up in your brain.
The more ideas you have written down (either physically or electronically), the easier it will be to see how to group and organize your content. You will be able to start sorting and grouping topics into hierarchical and logical structures and different topic categories. Once you have this going, you will then be able to plan your content more effectively, or see which topics make great general overviews that you can start with, and then later drill down or expand further into more specific and detailed content.
Later on, as you get better at doing this, you will learn about various tools that can help you break your ideas down into niche topics and how to make sure that any content you invest time into creating will already have a demand for readership and information by a viable segment of your target audience.
As we will also see later in this course, while your brain is capable of generating infinite content ideas, some of those ideas will not be opportunities worth pursuing, and you will learn how to discern between content ideas worth investing time and effort into pursuing, and ideas that are best left undeveloped.
Right now, however, all that we are interested in is getting the process started and turning action steps into a regular habit. We'll show you how to do all of the sorting and sifting and filtering and analyzing once you have a whole bunch of great topic ideas to create content about - and I promise that very soon you will have more ideas for articles, blog posts and other content than you will know what to do with it!
So ... enough chit chat! Have you ...
- Created an easy system for adding and retrieving great content ideas yet?
- Started adding ideas to your list of ideas?
- Are these ideas actually documented physically on a piece of paper or electronically ... or are they still just thoughts inside your head?
If you haven't done all of the above yet, there is no point going any further until you have taken the first action step and can check these items off your "to do" list.
If you have already done these first basic steps, then great! Bring up your list now and study it for a moment.
Are more ideas starting to jump out at you as you read the ideas that you have already added to your list? If you want to, take a couple of minutes right now to add new content ideas or article topics to your list. As the saying goes, "there's no better time than the present."
Have you added those ideas to your list? How long did you spend writing those ideas down and how many items were added?
It's a good idea to keep track of things like how long you spend brainstorming ideas and write these down.
If, for example, you spent 5 minutes and wrote 10 ideas down, that's 120 ideas you could write down if you were to brainstorm new content ideas in just a one hour session. You probably spend an hour driving in traffic or commuting on a bus or train to work everyday.
120 ideas can turn into one entire year's worth of great content for your website at just 2 blog posts a week.
2 blog posts a week can then turn into hundreds of new visitors discovering your website each month via search engines, which in turn can lead to dozens of new leads and sales for your business.
All this for just an hour's work using nothing more than your brain. It's really a "no brainer" when you think about it 😉
IN SUMMARY
One hour's worth of brainstorming content ideas can turn into a year's worth of great content for your website, which could then be working 24/7 online to help grow your business and drive new leads and sales.
ACTION STEP
Brainstorm at least 100 topic ideas for web content. Don't go any further until you have done this.
Discover more from Ultimate Virtual Solutions
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.