BTS of 500k impressions in 50 days for a client
Rocky Landscape: Gorge with Ruins(1830)
A great content piece is made up of lots of small parts stitched together.
Writing, editing, idea generation, first drafts, etc…
Some parts are more tiresome than others because they hold more weight. For me, it has always been generating good ideas. The core crux.
I’m a big fan of saying the same things in a novel way, that has always been my content philosophy.
But generating ideas is still a bit of a challenge, though I think over the years I have found a few tricks to make it easier and more autonomous.
One of those processes is the ability to capture ideas everywhere, from client calls to reading books.
Earlier, I struggled a lot because I used to sit down and force myself to come up with ideas right on the spot. Waiting for the muse to be so happy that this person is trying his best and saying “lemme award this fella.”
Of course, I soon realized that this was a disaster recipe and suffered from recency bias. I would often take ideas that were on top of my head, forgetting the advice of Mr. Munger who said:
"The great algorithm to remember in dealing with this tendency is simple: an idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it’s easily available to you.”
Now, the question arises, what is worth capturing?
I’ve loosely categorized them into 3 parts:
Problems faced while running your business – this includes developing a product, delivering a service, stealing from competitors
Notes from your consumption – maybe books, maybe a tweet, maybe a blog, maybe a subreddit, or maybe an underrated YouTube video
Reflection of life – changes in your opinion, change in your relationship status, change in your habits and so on
I pool them all into one place. In my Notion dashboard.
For the 1st one, I try to jot down my thoughts when I’m interviewing my clients, sometimes I flip through my journal, other times I take screenshots of a content piece from a competitor.
For the 2nd one, especially from books, I end each chapter with 3 lessons I learned, so by the end of the book I have like 20–30 potential content pieces. I manually type them down in my dashboard. For everything else (tweets to blogs), I use an extension called savetonotion. It’s a fucking lifesaver tool.
For the 3rd one, I just flip through my journal and my weekly reflection notes that I do in my Notion.
But the work isn’t complete after capturing, it actually just begins. I have this weekly habit of going through everything I captured and staring at it to see if I still love it as much as I did while capturing it.
Most of them don’t survive since I only loved them in the moment, but the ones that survive bring results like this:
recent client results
I think this is the reason so many content agencies cannot deliver for their clients because they put an unhealthy amount of time in other areas of writing. It can be editing, visuals or even flow and transitions.
This misses the mark. I've always believed that what you say matters more than how you say it.
If we get down to tactical, I think if you're spending, let's say, 2 hours on creating a content piece end-to-end, spend at least 30 min (maximum 60) on idea generation itself.
PS: If you're interested in a step-by-step guide on how I generate ideas for my clients, I've created a free guide.
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That's it for the day.
This is part of an email that I sent to my list.
If you wish to read my emails regularly, join my newsletter below.
Thank you for your attention.
