Let’s talk about content generation.
Now, it’s strange to me, but a common complaint amongst bloggers and other content marketers is, “Does anyone else think “I don’t know what to write?”
I’ve never had that problem. I love writing and I’ll write about just about anything.
Even as my online business stuff moves towards other stuff increasingly (boring admin stuff, mostly) content creation is fun and productive.
But if you’re one of those people who doesn’t know what content to create, fear not. I’m here to help.
Let’s dispel the “I don’t know what to write!” demon.
To start with let’s talk about why you don’t know what to write.
Newsflash: You Are Boring
The quickest way to have something good to write about is to do something interesting. You can make stuff up, but it’s not as fun and not as authentic.
I’m going to give you a way to be more interesting and exponentially up your content marketing output in one go:
Do A Thirty Day Challenge
I was checking out a guy whose blog I’ve read for year today.
I hadn’t checked it out since the end of 2017. Of late, he hasn’t been updating the blog very regularly, maybe two posts a month. So I didn’t think I’d be missing much.
Boy, was I wrong. Totally and utterly incorrect.
Turns out, at the beginning of the year, this guy started a thirty day challenge. Then he started another one when he finished that one.
And he blogged every single day.
And he blogged regular posts as well.
Since then, he’s posted updates, answers to questions (we’ll come back to that) and ruminations.
He’s even written a memoir of the challenges that people are buying.
Just taking those things into account, I ended up reading for an hour before scrolling through the pages to see how much was written. There’s a significant amount of content. 70+ posts and a book.
What Should I Do For A 30 Day Challenge?
This will depend on your niche, goals and sense of being. I’m not your Mum or Guardian Angel, so figure out what you’d like to change or achieve.
That said:
The challenges can be anything that involve you doing something every day and learning something with a semblance of depth.
One of the challenges my blogging inspiration used in the story above was reading a book a day.
Now, you have Tai Lopez morons who’ll tell you they read a book every day, but they general talk rubbish. They “read” “books” “every day” and it’s all skimming self-help rubbish.
The guy I’m talking about read actual books. This was quite a feat, but he covered everything from classics to fiction to history books.
That’s an immense amount of knowledge.
It all adds up to powerful and unique content. Nobody needs another “Five things I learned from Think and Grow Rich like if you do something of value you get paid.” Get out of here with that.
Generally though – effort and knowledge. Those are two things that’ll guarantee you have unique and useful content.
This could be:
- Health related (don’t be boring)
- Business related (don’t be boring)
- Intellect related (don’t be boring)
You get the picture.
Do stuff every day & pick something with depth
That’s the formula.
What Goal Should I Pick?
I suggest for this that you take an absurdly unrealistic goal.
When it comes to thirty day challenges, there are two camps:
- People who suggest realistic stuff
- People who suggest unrealistic stuff
These two camps interact with two types of people:
- People who are going to stick to the challenge
- People who aren’t
Now… you want to be the most interesting person you can be, and there’s no telling where you are on the matrix formed by those four options.
So you go with the unrealistic goal.
Unrealistic + give up = some funny stories and lessons learned.
Realistic + give up = boring.
Realistic + complete = better but less feedback
Unrealistic + completed = Instant Guru Status ™
It should be realistic that you can at least in theory accomplish it every day. But aside from that – outlandish is better.
Here’s a good reason why:
Feedback Loops
Anyone who does this sort of thing and pushes themselves to create unique content regularly will tell you that it creates a positive set of feedback loops.
An easy example to point out is this site: a simple “post every day challenge” has led to nearly 1,000 articles of goodness, as well as spawned multiple businesses successes (both for me and other people) and I’ve built a network of folks and all that other stuff.
But from a pure content perspective, if you do a thirty day challenge that’s even remotely interesting, and you then write about it – you’ll get more content ideas. People will email you and say, “Hey… how do you do this?” or “Someone else did this!” or “Have you considered that?”
This then gives you more impetus to continue, more pressure to succeed and higher status on the Wisdom Council of Guru Elders ™.
This will inevitably lead to you becoming an expert, writing memoirs and if not those, then you’ll establish yourself as a person who has walked the walk among a sea of blogs and social networks where everyone just talks and posts pictures of them at restaurants and stuff.
Final Thoughts
I find it crazy that people on online forums and Twitter and whatever talk about how saturated blogging, vlogging, and online business are. This seems crazy to me because nobody does anything remotely interesting.
Using this method, you’ll be interesting and will provide interesting content to everyone. There will be no competition because nobody is going to do the exact thing you’ll do and they won’t take insight from it in the same way you do.
This will also fix your life.
It’s impossible to be depressed, stagnate and otherwise be bored if you’re doing stuff and learning stuff.