5 Unusual Ways to Find New Inspiration for Content!

Why can’t coming up with new content be easier?!

Look, you know how this goes…you have a great series of ideas for the next series of blog posts or videos while you are in the shower, only to become completely flummoxed when you sit down later to write them all down.

Writer’s block can happen to the best of us.

I try to write at least 750 words every day in addition to creating new content for my clients and my own projects, so I am constantly exercising that inner creative muscle. But the truth is, even with all this creative exercise and practice, sometimes I still find myself struggling to find an idea that inspires me to create something new.

Thankfully, I have uncovered some ways to help rev up that inspiration engine.

Here are five ideas that I regularly use in my own day-to-day efforts!:

A Game of Unlikely Elements

This is a game I play with myself that can unleash some phenomenal results. I’ll use tools like The Storymatic, which is a deck of cards with random elements of a story on cards combined in odd variations. For an article, I might just pull one card from the deck and then my challenge is to somehow work it into the article or post I am writing. Sometimes focusing on the game of making it work helps to get past the boring, but the more common issue of getting started in the first place.

Another approach in this tactic is to post a tweet on Twitter asking for one random word to try to fit into the piece. You create the same result with the additional bonus of being able to then share with that person – and the rest of Twitter – how you creatively used their helpful suggestion.

If neither of these approaches works for you, you can also just pick up a random book and open it to a page. Put your finger on the page and let it settle on a sentence. Your goal will be to use part of that sentence in your piece.

Get the gist of it? In “The Game of Unlikely Elements” you grab something and create a connection out of it for your topic. This is a fun way to insert a little serendipity into your life and can turn even the most mundane of topics into something a little more unusual.

Social Bearing

Socialbearing.com gives you a glimpse of whatever topic you are writing about through the lens of Twitter. It provides metrics, word clouds, hashtags, tweets with the most engagement featuring your chosen topic, and top words used in the tweet. I especially love this free tool because it allows you to discover other hashtags that might be relevant to your topic and that will reach a wider audience that is potentially interested in what you create on the subject.

Sometimes when I use Social Bearing, I end up coming across events and individuals I’ve never heard of and that quickly expands my knowledge into top influencers in different industries. My primary audience is usually in the not-for-profit association sector, but I can discover relevant source material from the most-respected minds in a wide span of industries when I use this tool to expand my horizons as I develop content.

Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a website featuring new tech products and often you can even interact with the makers of those products, ask them questions about their products, and give them feedback. You can find a huge number of tools offered in beta so that if you are a tech junkie like I am, you can find really great tools early.

One of my clients is a developer of tech products and I often use Product Hunt to help in my research. But one of the things I love doing with the site is using Product Hunt for content creation! You can type in almost any topic and find a tech tool that has been created to help with it. This can lead you to identify products that are offering new types of services that have never been offered before or new types of integrations that people have been asking for, like in the case of using Zoom for virtual conferences.

If you want to go a little further into the Product Hunt ecosystem, you can explore the questions and feedback that is shared with the makers of certain products. This gives you insight into other tools you may never have heard of and what problems people are still seeking solutions for in your chosen subject area.

FAQ Fox

This is kind of an interesting little tool that searches different places than your typical search engine and keyword tools. FAQ Fox looks in subreddits and forums to look at the questions that people are asking about your topic and the words they are using to ask. This is a great tool to use when adding quora as a site to search because you know you could then supply an answer to that person on Quora and extend the reach of your content.

(You can also look at the creator of FAQ Fox’s website for additional free tools, including a “Blog Post Idea Generator” that will take your topic and create a potential title using popular formulas for headlines that get clicks. It also allows you to then Google that exact headline so you can see if anyone else has used it and what else people have written similar to it.)

This Old Content

If you like home renovation shows, you may be familiar with the old show called This Old House. In that show, the home renovation expert would go in and take a broken-down old house and repair it so that it is better than new.

Similar to This Old House, the “This Old Content” approach can take old content that was great for your topic a year ago and transform it into shiny new content with a fresh coat of paint! Many of us have evergreen content that is great on its own. But if that content was shared several years ago, there are likely new notes, resources, or quotes that can be added to give it a fresh look.

When I don’t feel like recreating the wheel, sometimes I look at a group of old videos (videos can look dates very quickly) or old blog posts from a few years previous and see if the content just needs a new format and lens. You might even be able to get super creative and just use the audio from old videos and refresh the content around it.

Inspiration is always close at hand

Even when you are overworked and fatigued, there are many ways to add variety to content without using up all your creative stores! With these five tactics, even the most exhausted content creator can find some new angle to work with and can get through what is necessary to create a new piece of content.

Which of these ideas appeal best to you? Share your favorite tip with me on Twitter @kikilitalien!