Ideas When You Are Stuck

Why this use is different

Producing content requires being right, and producing ideas does not.

A list of thirty suggestions where four are useful is a success, because you were going to discard twenty-six anyway.

Nothing gets published, nothing needs verifying, and the failure mode is a wasted five minutes.

Which makes brainstorming the lowest-consequence use of these tools and one of the more genuinely productive ones.

Ask for far more than you need

Since the good ones are at the bottom.

The first five suggestions to any request are the most obvious ones, which are the ones you already thought of.

Asking for thirty pushes it past the obvious into things that are stranger and occasionally useful.

Then ask for twenty more, which is where the genuinely unexpected ones appear.

Discarding forty-five suggestions to find five is the correct ratio rather than a failure of the exercise.

Nobody does this because asking for five feels more reasonable, and five produces nothing you did not have.

Describe the situation, not the request

• What you actually do, specifically.
• Who your customers are.
• What they ask before buying.
• What a job costs and how long.
• What you have already written.
• What you refuse to take on.

The last two matter most. Telling it what you have covered stops it suggesting those again, and telling it what you refuse produces suggestions in the shape of your actual opinions rather than a general survey of the trade.

The questions that produce better lists

Since the framing changes the output more than the wording does.

What would somebody want to know before spending four thousand dollars on this.

What do customers get wrong about this work.

What would a competitor never write about.

What questions am I asked on site that never appear on anybody's website.

Each of those produces a different list, and all of them beat asking for blog post ideas.

The third is the most productive, since it points at exactly the ground nobody in your trade is occupying.

A worked example

A business had run out of things to write about after eighteen months of posting.

Asking for article ideas produced the same list they had worked through already.

They described their trade in detail, listed what they had covered, and asked what a customer would want to know before committing to a job of that size.

That produced thirty questions, of which about eight were things they answer weekly on the telephone and had never written down.

Those eight became three months of posts, and two of them became the pages that now bring in the most enquiries.

The exercise took twenty minutes.

Use it to sort, not only to generate

The second half of the exercise and the more useful one.

Give it your own list of twenty possible topics and ask which a customer close to buying would search for.

Ask which three would be hardest for a competitor to write.

Ask which are really the same topic and should be one page.

Those are structural judgements it handles reasonably, and they are the part of the work people find hardest.

Sorting a list you produced is safer than adopting a list it produced, since the material is already yours.

Keep the discarded ones

Since the exercise produces more than one session's worth.

Put the whole list somewhere, not just the four you chose.

Several of the rejected ones become good six months later when circumstances change or a customer asks about them.

It also means you never repeat this exercise from nothing, which is what makes it feel unproductive the second time.

Add to that list whenever a customer asks something, which is the source that never runs out.

Note beside each why you rejected it, since a topic dismissed as too obvious in March is frequently the right one in September.

The idea is not the work

Worth saying plainly, since this is where the exercise misleads.

Thirty good topics do not produce thirty good pages, and having the list can feel like having done something.

The writing, the specifics, the photographs, and the figures are the work, and none of that gets shorter.

Businesses that generate lists and publish nothing are common, and the list was not the constraint.

Pick one, write it properly, and treat the other twenty-nine as inventory rather than as progress, since inventory is only worth something once it has been made into a page.

Ask for the objections as well

A variant that produces something more useful than topics.

Describe what you sell and ask what reasons somebody would have for not buying it, or for choosing a competitor instead.

That produces a list of objections, and each objection is a page, a paragraph, or a line on a quote.

It also tends to surface the ones you have stopped hearing because you answer them so automatically on the telephone that they never register as objections at all.

Sort the list by how often you actually hear each, then write about the top three, which is a better content plan than most businesses ever produce.

The counter-case

Your own sources are usually better.

Your inbox, your call log, and the thing you explained twice this week produce topics grounded in what customers actually asked, which no tool can match.

The suggestions also tend toward the topics everybody covers, which is precisely the ground where competing is hardest.

And a business with no shortage of ideas does not need this at all.

Describe your situation properly, ask for fifty, use it to sort your own list, and keep everything you discard.

The twenty minutes

1. Describe your trade specifically.
2. List what you have covered.
3. Ask for thirty, then twenty more.
4. Ask what competitors would never write.
5. Sort your own list with it.
6. Keep every suggestion.
7. Write one properly.

Step four is the highest-yield question, since it points directly at the ground nobody in your trade is occupying, which is where a small business can actually win.

The sources that never run out are covered in finding something to write about every week.

Frequently asked questions

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