Five Ideas I Use For Generating More Content
A question I get quite often is how I generate so much content for LinkedIn.
Here are five methods I use that help make writing an average of four articles a week pretty easy.
The premise of the post is not set in concrete
Typically when I come to write a piece of content I have my basic idea already there in my notes, a possible title, plus some bullet points and ideas. So with those to start with I start writing. While I am writing I have one overriding guideline: I let the writing take me where it wants to go. What will often happen is I will get really interested in a facet of my post or article and wind up wandering off in a tangential direction to my original idea; and often it’s a better direction than my original idea. The original idea for this post was to write about evergreen content, but it evolved into something related but not on that topic. I still have that idea set aside to come back to another time.
The post may in fact be posts
I often will write and by the time I am done, I am thinking, “that’s too long”. My main publishing vehicles are my newsletters (this one on LinkedIn and a longer one for my email subscribers), and my readers seem to like something every week, but something they can read quickly and take away a thought idea or something to experiment with. There are exceptions, but in general I keep it short. If something winds up being seven or eight minutes in reading time, I am going to look for a way to chop it in two. A good example of this is an idea I had the other day about advertising on LinkedIn. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that something on advertising would best be put in context of an overall sales and marketing effort. That original idea looks like it will morph onto a six part series. One piece of content has (or will, I am only half done) become six.
Adding and expanding existing topics
A lot of content comes from adding and expanding on existing topics. A newsletter piece I wrote earlier today was based on a piece I wrote several years ago on managing your homepage feed. But today was about one specific aspect of that, people whose posts you want to avoid altogether.
Coming at a topic from a different angle
A good example of this idea was an article I wrote for a newsletter on hashtags (mind you, this back when hashtags were still in vogue on LinkedIn). It was for marketers…all the different ways hashtags could be used with articles, posts and on company pages. A complete marketers guide to hashtags. While I was writing the article though, I started thinking of ways sales people could use hashtags. They were good ideas, but certainly didn’t fit with the content focus of the post I was writing. So I wrote a second post from a sales perspective.
Use comments and input from all over
I had a comment on an article this morning on something I wrote four years ago (the one on homepage feeds I referenced above). I wound up writing a very long response to the comment and when I hit publish I realized that I had the core of a good post there. I probably get one in every four or five posts that way – a comment or question that comes out of another piece of content I have written.
These are all examples of being open to ideas and sources for your content. I try not to be too structured in my writing. Often what I end up writing bears little resemblance to what I figured I would be writing about. This works for me. Find what works for you and you will do well with your content.
