How to Create More Content With One Simple Mindset
How to Never Run Out of Fun Content for Your Audience Ever Again.
When it comes to being productive and having creative output there’s one thing that’s key:
Always being open to ideas.
This one mentality is what makes everything easier. It’s what I call the “Content Hacking Mentality” and it’s something I touch upon in my article, How To Consistently Write Hundreds of Articles People Love
If you are a content creator, whether you’re a blogger, podcaster or Youtube star, keeping this mentality in the back of your mind at all times will make sure you never run out creative ideas.
When I say open-minded, I mean having an open mind to your boring, day-to-day life and seeing how your quotidian activities can inspire you. Of course, you should also be open-minded and tolerant of others around you, but we won’t be discussing that today.
Being open to ideas is easier said than done because granted, daily life is fairly routine and uninspiring. However, if you can keep this mindset in the back of your brain, you’ll become more prolific in much less time.
What to do after you’ve laid the foundation?
If you’ve been creating content for a while and you’ve already done the typical blog posts and foundation articles in your niche you might be struggling to figure out what to talk about next.
When I say foundation articles, I mean things you would cover in a 101 class as an introduction to the topic. This content is the “essential requirements” your audience needs to know. For example, a health and fitness blogger might put together a 10-day email sequence focused on critical, easy exercises and a simple diet.
The question is, once you create that pillar content, what do you talk about next? There are only so many ways to discuss the basics of any niche, and usually, the techniques you teach the beginners are always the same.
That’s what your pillar content is for and why you need to get that out of the way first. However, if you just keep rehashing those same ideas over and over again, your audience will get tired of you pretty quickly.
Hack Your Content
That’s when this “Content Hacking Mentality” comes in. It’ll make it easier to create more by using the ideas that are all around you in your day to day experiences.
Think of this mindset as a switch in the back of your brain that’s constantly turned on to “Content Idea Mode.” That way your routines become less like routine and more like research.
The way you “hack content” is to always think about how anything you’re doing is “sort of like” something that’s relevant to your niche.
When you go about your day, think about how your personal life can relate to how you can solve your audience’s problems. If you can tell a personal story and relate it to how it’s “kind of like” how you “solve Problem X” then you’ll always be able to create fresh content.
This style will make your content more personable and relatable to your audience. They’ll feel like they’re interacting with a real human being instead of a text book. You see, there’s a reason people dislike classes at school. It has nothing to do with the subject matter, but rather the dryness and the yawn-inducing way some professors teach their subjects.
Don’t be a boring professor. Be a fun, professional expert.
This “Content Hacking Mentality” is how I create content for my audience. It’s worked well for me in the past, and it’s enabled me to write about 1,000 pieces of content about the same subject matter.
All I do is keep an open mind when I’m going about my day to day life, thinking about how I can find a different angle on the same subject while still keeping it personal and lighthearted.
Let me give you an example:
I write about music production and home recording over at Audio Issues. One article I am especially proud of and illustrates this example perfectly is this one:
What Doing the Dishes Can Teach You About Audio Editing.
I wrote this post years ago, but I always come back to it because it’s such a good example of this mentality.
The boring snapshot of my day that inspired this post was, unsurprisingly, when I was doing the dishes one day after dinner. This was back when I didn’t have a dishwasher, so I had to clean everything by hand. Washing up after a big meal is annoying, and I’m the type of cook that uses too many cutting boards and has a pot on every part of the stove.
However, because I keep my brain open to ideas that are irrelevant to my niche but could be portrayed as being “kinda/sorta like it” I connected the parallels between doing the boring dishes and editing audio.
In case you didn’t know, audio editing is done after you record a band or a performance and involves a little bit of clean up before you start mixing the recording to sound like a professional record. So, in a way, the two things have a lot in common. You clean up the audio so that you can enjoy the mixing process, just like you clean up your kitchen before you have fun cooking.
Flick Your Content Switch
Before you leave today, I want you to take the necessary action to help you create more content for your audience.
Keep an open mind to the similarities between your day to day life and the content you want to create. Think about the things that happen to you on a given day and see how they are “kind of like” something related to your particular topic of discussion.
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