This is my fifth article I’ve begun work on today alone. I have no limit on ideas for topics, I have a limit on time I can allocate to writing. That being said, the more ideas you have to write about, the easier it can be to find your groove to write. Ideas are a dime a dozen, so you can afford to have more than you need and throw out whatever doesn’t stick.
I used to struggle to find topics to write about. Just like anything else, figuring out what to write about is as much its own skill as editing or headline writing. A topic is the first step in an article, you need to find something which you can and are willing to write about, and it shouldn’t be the same thing over and over (unless that’s your whole shtick).
People get bored with a topic eventually. And, while you may cover one specific area of expertise in your blog or content, you aren’t covering the exact same item each and every time. Personally though, I get bored with the same types of topics over and over again. The system I use works well for both people who want to write about the same things and people who don’t.
Coming Up with Ideas
I think of my blog topics as the mature fruits of an idea. The idea is the animal, and the topic is the cut of meat. The same idea can be served up many different ways to suit different tastes. A hamburger has a different type of satisfaction than a steak.
A topic is the first step in an article because your article should ultimately boil down to a single topic. While the descriptor for the topic might get longer and longer the broader your article gets, there should be a clear statement of intent which defines why you wrote your article. Sometimes, that topic won’t mean anything to anyone but you (e.g. how I felt today), but it still needs to exist or else your writing has gone on past making sense.
I tap three main sources to come up with ideas. I try to draw from my personal experiences, external research, and popular topics. These can also be thought of as: what I know, what I’m learning, and what’s happening. I use this division because to know more, I have to learn more, but I also need a context of what’s going on to keep it relevant.
Personal Experiences
What are you doing and what have you done? These are always easy topics, but they have their caveats. If you live to write, this category is going to get monotonous in no time. The other caveat is they’re dominated by our emotions, for better and for worse.
People read content online to learn something or to feel something. The complex set of experiences and emotions you went through can be turned into something emotional and cathartic for people to connect to, or something more educational about what you learned from the experience. These factors can also be blended to make something more complex.
What experiences do you have that set you apart from others? What have you gone through which others can benefit from reading about? How do you handle a problem (technical, socially, or otherwise)? People love experiences, but only if they can relate or aspire to them.
Knowledge is also arguably a form of experience. What have you learned and how has it impacted you? How can you relay something you’ve learned which helps you? The intent can be as impactful as the message itself.
The one problem with this well of content is that it can get monotonous unless you’re living it up every minute. Most people are creatures of habit, so, how many hours a day do you have which have unique experiences? Of those unique experiences, how many are in any way insightful? For most people, there’s a little insight, and a lot of monotony. They tend to live in their hobbies and their interests. If you only write, you exhaust your supply of experiences which are of value which aren’t related to writing.
External Research
Experience is lost when there isn’t the knowledge on hand to conceptualize what is going on. Research is done with the intent to develop your knowledge. Knowledge without experience is useless outside of academic pursuits though. What are you doing with what you’re learning?
The depth often depends on the goal of researching, and the interest in it. If you need to research for a project, you’ll go more in depth than if you want to add in a quick, external reference. How far you go when reading for fun or reading for research often depends on the interest in the subject. If you like what you’re reading about, you’ll be inclined to read more. I say reading, but I mean consuming media however makes sense.
If you’re writing about a movie and you don’t like the movie, the actors, or the director, you probably won’t dive that deep into it. These topics also tend to be dead ends unless you can write about anything (or the price is right). I write a lot of content about things I couldn’t care less about without breaking a sweat. I research them as dearly as I do my own hobbies and interests because they pay the bills with my content pipeline.
External research provides plenty of knowledge, but it doesn’t really help with experience or putting them in a social context. What’s the demand for your writing about the two-hundred words you learned for some niche and the rate of them becoming slang terms? They may all be relevant to your research and your experiences, but as you cut down deeper into a topic, you tend to cut out people interested without looking into trends.
Popular Topics
What’s happening in the world that relates to what you know or have experienced? An experience can be interpreted many ways if you ignore society at large. People who live in insular bubbles often find themselves more and more unable to relate to society at large.
What’s happening in the world at large? The news is often uncomfortable, but it pays to be at least somewhat informed. Along with the news, you need to look at trends. If you do social media, what’s happening on Twitter or similar? The wrong post at the wrong time can become a politically charged statement in the wrong context. If you watch what’s going on, you reduce the risk of this occurring.
Some topics are more profitable than others. “Fidget Spinner Reviews” will sound absolutely absurd at present, but for a few months could net the right writer a pretty penny with affiliate links. Other topics live in a niche. Some will be around for years, but others will fizzle out as quickly as they popped into existence.
Fads, trends, and news are all different facets of society which need to be looked at. Fads are short-lived but can impact trends. Trends are the direction society is tending at some point. It can change course but it takes time and effort. The news is what is happening at present. What’s happening can be the difference between gasoline and water being thrown on a fire. Each feeds into the others, but only tells you a piece of the story.
These same principles apply to niches and similar. If you’re writing for a small community, what’s happening in that community? Knowing the fads, trends, and topics of interest is arguably even more important at this point.
Avoiding Ingrowth
If you pick one source over the other, you’ll tend to stagnate. You need to experience life, learn new things, and pay attention to the world at large to continue growing. You may be able to coast for a bit, but eventually you cut yourself off.
I hate reading up on the news, but it is essential to my well-being as a writer and a person to know what’s going on. I also pay attention to the trends, and fads in anything I’m involved with and try to seek out new experiences and new ways to grow as a person. Reading is important to me, as is research for fun and for profit.
By combining these factors, I continue to grow as a person and as a writer. If you feel that your topics are getting more and more pigeonholed, try something new. You’re probably in a rut which has led to an ingrowth in your writing. Excise it with new life.
Try new things and take risks writing. Expand your horizons for both knowledge and wisdom. The more varied your experiences, knowledge, and context around them, the more permutations you can make from the same ingredients.
Onions are wonderful aromatics, but if you always prep and cook them the same, they lose their charm. Quality, quantity, (cut) size, cooking method, etc. all factor into how flexible and unique an ingredient they are. The same thing in a thousand things is as boring as the same thing every time with enough exposure. Spice it up by working it in ways people don’t expect, but don’t rely on gimmicks either.
Diversifying Your Topics
Each individual idea you come up can be combined with other ideas. The idea to write a blog post about an algorithm can be combined with the idea to write about a specific language to end up with a new and unique topic. You cut the potential audience, but you get more of a long tail effect. There may be a surplus of articles about the primary topic derived from your idea, but what about that topic in action?
Where do your wisdom and knowledge collide? If you go abroad, knowing about culture shock is completely different from dealing with culture shock. That experience is going to be unique to you, but overlap with others. What makes it relatable and what makes it unique? There isn’t going to be a universal answer depending on who you were, who you became, and who you’re writing to or for.
Unless you’re writing for a niche or a specific style of content, your content is going to be a mix. The ratio of knowledge to wisdom (as experience) is going to vary depending on the topic. For a science-focused blog, you probably want to avoid anecdote unless it furthers an explanation. A travel blog on the other hand is going to get boring quick if it becomes a history essay (unless that’s the target).
This dimension also provides a way to diversify certain topics. For our hypothetical science blog above, the ratio can be pushed one way or another about the same underlying topic to get multiple topics. The general topic of relativity can be split into a drier article about the scientific implications, an article about the history and how learning about it impacted you, and a more experience-centric article about how relatively got you interested in physics or similar.
Branching Out
When you distill the base idea back out of a topic, you can adjust the ratio and create a new topic. Whether the topic will be suitable depends on the type of content you’re producing. This method can also be used to get topics from what you read. How does the knowledge enrich you or what did you learn about yourself while learning something else? What process did you use to learn the material?
While this seems like common sense, it also feels like cheating to some people (I know because I was one of them). Don’t plagiarize, but don’t be afraid to borrow ideas and create them into something new. A song can be copyrighted, but the chord progression can’t, and for good reason. You’re going to incidentally write about the same thing as someone else, but as long as you aren’t stealing their words, you’re not doing anything wrong. If you do use something, give credit where credit is due (and check the legal ramifications of doing so).
This is a powerful strategy, especially combined with the difference between knowledge and wisdom for milking a topic. It’s fine as long as you spread the topics out (unless writing about one thing is your thing). Too many small branches growing off the same branch on a tree drag the branch down and weaken the tree. Give the material time to mature so that you don’t just flood your audience with one thing.
Conclusion
Learn to grow ideas into topics and you’ll have an endless amount of potential content to write. Start with what you’ve experienced, what you’ve researched, and things which are popular. If the topics get boring, mix them into each other or take it further. The more you learn and do, the bigger the reservoir you can draw on. When you cross this with what’s going on in the world, you can make things more relevant.
Each of these reservoirs has its own limitations. I think of it like food, water, and air over a lifetime, a shortage of any of them and you’re basically done for. The ideas borne from these reservoirs can be crossed to get new topics.
Shift the ratio of knowledge to wisdom to potentially create a new topic. You can also branch out with topics. Derive new content from what you learned for other content. How does it impact you and how have you grown? This can get redundant if you overdo it, but it’s an easy way to create more content if you’re already stuck.
As you break down your content creation process, you’ll see new places to apply these principles. Try adding them into the content creation process a step or two at a time to get a better handle on how they affect your process. Hell, throw them all in if you’re completely stuck. Over time, they’ll become natural in the process, or will at least empower you to develop your own method to generate topics for content.
Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay