When marketing your business, you’re going to do a lot of writing. Regardless of whether you have the resources within your company to cope with this, or hire in a professional copywriter, one thing you’re going to need a lot of is ideas for 
your content.
Ideas can come from anywhere at any time, so you have to make sure you’re ready to record them when they strike because you never know when the next one will come from.
So what’s the best way to go about that?
Here are a couple of ideas for you that work for me.
Pen and Paper
It doesn’t matter how technologically advanced we get, there’ll always be a place for the humble pen and paper.
Ideas can come at you from all angles during your working day:
- Customer comments
- Articles in magazines and newspapers
- New items on the TV or radio
- Mail shots
- Emails
- Random conversations…
That’s why it’s best to be prepared and have a pen and paper to hand so you can jot it down before you forget it.
Conversations with customers are a real goldmine for content ideas. After all, if they have a particular query or question, it’s highly likely that someone else will also want the same answer, so it’s idea fodder for a ‘how to’ or ‘top tips’ article.
Swipe file
Despite its name this is not an open invitation to plagiarism.
You’ll see hundreds of sales messages every day in all sorts of formats – emails, physical mail, newsletters etc. Some you will read and others you’ll ignore.
But what about those that you did read – what made you take the time out of your say to read it? Was it the headline? A particular story?
Analyse the items that grabbed your attention and work out what it was that make you read it. Once you’ve worked that out, you can emulate it in your own writing. After all, if it made you stop and take notice, the chances are others did too.
Keeping pieces of marketing that grabbed your interest and jotting down ideas as and when they occur to you will ensure you’re never short of ideas when it comes to content generation.
It is a never ending process, so it pays to be organised and to be prepared.
What about you?
Do you use any other techniques to generate ideas? If so, leave a comment below, we’d love to hear from you.