In the preceding steps you did the required research to develop a calendar full of relevant, interesting content. Now comes the fun part: using this information to inspire the topics for the content you'll develop over the next three months.

You already used the worksheet 1. CONTENT RESOURCES to figure out what you have in the way of resources and how much content you can realistically develop. From this, you should have a rough idea of how many topics you'll need.

Here's the plan for this portion of the Playbook. You will be:

1. Creating monthly themes.
2. Brainstorming ideas for Big Rock pieces of content.

The great news with this plan is that you're not just going to be brainstorming content to fill your calendar. Anyone can come up with a bunch of random ideas and stick them into a schedule! Instead, you are going to be brainstorming great ideas that fit monthly themes and move you toward your goals. Your content will be all the good things: relevant, compelling, useful, cost-effective...and better than what your competition is publishing.

1. BUILD THEMES

Building your content calendar around themes will help you streamline the next three months of content production.

To get started, watch the Build Themes video:

Having trouble watching this video?  click here

THE WHY

Here are five reasons to work with themes.

1. Themes serve as "guardrails around your creativity." They make it easier to develop ideas because they give you something to aim for and keep you from getting too far off track.
2. Themes keep you from becoming overwhelmed with all the possibilities. Imagine an HVAC company searching on Google for “content ideas“ as opposed to “content ideas about HVAC safety." Which phrase would net the most useful results?
3. Your completed content will be easier to cross-link, repurpose, and promote because all the assets will be relevant to one another.
4. It will be easier for you to see what performs well and what doesn't. For example, if your traffic spikes in January when you're doing a theme around X, and then nosedives in February when you do a theme around Y, it's simple to surmise that your audience finds X very interesting and Y very uninteresting.
5. Having a theme for each month will help you reach your goals, rather than just producing content for content's sake, because you'll be developing your themes around things that matter for your brand—such as your customer personas, product launches, leadership viewpoints, or company news.

But don't stress out, thinking that all your content needs to be "theme or bust." There are several reasons you may choose to create content that doesn't fit neatly into your themes.

1. The topic is very timely, and if you waited until you could fit it into a monthly theme it would go stale.
2. The idea is so killer that you simply have to use it now.
3. You have a lot of existing content that can be reoptimized and republished, and you want to use some of it up.
4. You have some holes in your content calendar; there just aren't enough related topics to fill out an entire month's worth of content.

Convinced? Let's get started.

THE HOW

Based on your previous research and your knowledge of your company's customers, upcoming products, and needs, use the prompts below to develop a theme for each of the next three months. The worksheet 8. CONTENT THEMES in the Toolkit includes all these prompts plus space for notes.

Could you create a theme around...

...an upcoming holiday? (Don’t forget “National Days” like National Hot Dog Day! You can find National Day calendars easily online, but be careful not to fall into a rabbit hole.)

...a product your company is releasing over the next three months?

...an industry topic your company can claim to be a thought-leader in?

...a major customer pain point your competitors haven’t addressed?

...one of your customer personas?

...different levels of your lead funnel? (Awareness, interest, etc.)

...new industry trends?

...a particular format/download type? (For example, a month of content that includes quizzes, templates, cheat sheets, scripts, worksheets, etc.)

...one of your favorite/most representative clients? (You don’t have to mention the client...just create content around their challenges, wins, questions, etc.)

...one of your least favorite or least happy clients? (Same as the above. What makes them not a fit? Why could you not satisfy them?)

...different aspects of your product or service? (If you’re a software company, for example, this could be a month of content round each of the top features.)

...a challenge or opportunity for your audience that you uncovered in your Media Audit?

The idea of committing to a monthly theme may make you feel like I introduced you to someone and then immediately asked you to marry them.

But remember that you can always adjust a theme if necessary, depending on what comes up in the next few steps. Keep the mindset that anything is changeable; as for right now, the themes will help you cut through the overwhelm during the next step, which is brainstorming content ideas.

2. LIST 100 CONTENT IDEAS

Finally! All the prep-work and research you've done has led to this golden moment: the idea brainstorm.

Start by watching the List 100 Content Ideas video:

Having trouble watching this video?  click here

THE WHY

Your content ideas will make or break your content calendar. After all, what good is a calendar that's filled with irrelevant, stale, or boring ideas?

Not to mention, coming up with topics on an as-needed basis is stressful—"I need to get up a new blog post tomorrow, what am I going to do?!"—and rushing, as we know, doesn't lead to the best results. Develop your list of topics now, and you'll have the time and mental bandwidth later to produce the very best content.

THE HOW

You'll start by brainstorming 100 ideas. Yes, 100. And you'll do it as quickly as possible. You can use the worksheet 9. IDEA BRAINSTORM for this.

The volume of ideas, and the time limitation for creating them, will ensure that you follow the golden rule of brainstorming, which is to not judge the ideas as they spill from your brain. Sometimes you have to clear all the crummy ideas out of the way before you reveal the gold hidden underneath them. (And yes, there will be crummy ideas. Lots of them.)

Don't even worry right now about what makes a good content idea. Later you'll be tweaking the ideas that come out of this process to make sure they're perfect, using a filter that ensures that each topic hits at least one of the top six characteristics of a successful idea. So for now, just write.

Be sure to keep your three themes top of mind as you brainstorm. You may even want to challenge yourself to come up with 30 to 40 ideas for each theme. It's no problem if ideas pop up that don't fit into the themes; write them down anyway. They could be winners—in which case you might tweak them to fit a theme, adjust a theme to fit your ideas, or decide to run with the ideas even if they're not a perfect match.

If your previous research isn't getting the idea gears turning fast enough, use the list of prompts below to get you going; these are also on the worksheet 10. IDEA KICKSTARTER PROMPTS, which includes space for you to jot down notes on each.

• • During my Brand Content Audit, I noticed that we haven’t thoroughly covered these important topics:
  • During my Media Audit, these are the challenges I saw for our audience:
  • During my Media Audit, these are the opportunities I saw for our audience:
  • The holidays coming up over the next 3 months are:
  • I would never tell a customer/prospect this about our business/industry: (Maybe you should consider being the one to break the news!)
  • These clients have been killing it with our product/service:
  • The biggest news stories of the past two weeks are:
  • The least-known benefits our customers have gotten/can get from our product/service are:
  • These companies in our space are doing better than us, and here’s why:
  • These companies in our space are doing worse than us, and here’s why:
  • In our industry right now, I’m angry about:
  • In our industry right now, I’m grateful for:
  • I have these predictions for our industry for the next six months:
  • I have these predictions for our customers’ industry for the next six months:
  • Here’s why prospects don’t purchase our product/service:
  • These are the biggest challenges we’ve had as a company in the last three months:
  • These employees in our company are doing something interesting:
  • This is what our customers wish someone had told them:
  • A coworker/customer told me this weird story:
  • This is the biggest reason customers should use our product/service...that they don’t already know:

Any of these questions will load your brain with information that it can combine into new, unique ideas.

3. FILTER YOUR IDEAS

Remember when I told you to not worry if your ideas stink? I'll bet that after writing out 100 of them, you have a load of unusable ideas, a bunch of "meh" ones, and a few obvious winners. Now you'll be running the good and great ideas from your list through a filter to get them calendar-ready.

Start by watching the Filter Your Ideas video:

Having trouble watching this video?  click here

THE WHY

Tossing ideas onto paper and then running with them as-is is for content amateurs. It's efficient, but it's not effective. Just a few minutes of thought on each of the ideas you plan to run—to tweak, re-angle, and hone—make the difference between an adequate content program and a successful one. 

THE HOW

I created a filtering system that helps content writers perfect their ideas, based on my 15+ years of experience teaching magazine writing to aspiring freelancers. There are six filters to run your ideas through. They will help you weed out ideas that are less likely to be successful and polish up the remaining ideas until they're the best they can be. The worksheet 11. IDEA FILTER will give you space to filter 15 ideas; make a copy of the worksheet if you have more than that.

Below is an illustration of the process. The top principle, Relevant, is crucial. The lower you go down, the more "nice to have" instead of "need to have" it is. (If you can get all six of these into one idea, you've hit the jackpot!) Run each candidate through these filters and try to make it fit as many as possible. I offer suggestions on how to make ideas fit each filter if they don't already.

Again, this is a creative, messy process! I'll leave it up to you to decide which ideas to run through this filter based on your three themes, your audience, the formats you need (blog posts, reports, etc.), and your personal preferences. And I'll remind you once more that you can always adjust your themes as needed as you go through this filtering process.

FILTER #1: RELEVANT

The most important criterion for a successful content topic is that there are a good number of people in your audience base who actually care about the topic. If no one can relate to your idea, your content won't get results.

If your idea isn't relevant: Try including the idea as just one part of a larger topic. For instance, a topic that's of interest to only three percent of your customer base can be wrapped into a story about 10 related things. The general idea is the same, but now you've expanded it in a way that will make it relevant to a larger number of readers.

Example: a post for a real estate blog on the best restaurant in Raleigh's Cameron Village neighborhood can become a list of the top restaurant in each of Raleigh's 10 biggest neighborhoods.

FILTER #2: TIMELY

As we go down the filter, while the principles are still great to have, they're less and less critical to the overall success of your content idea.

For the Timely filter, ask yourself: why is this content topic needed now? Could it have run five years ago? (The answer to that last one should be "no.")

If your idea isn't timely:

1. Peg it to the news. Let's say your idea is a thought-leadership piece about the importance of making difficult decisions in business. As of this writing in mid-2020, you can try tying the topic in to COVID-19, quarantining, working at home, or the election. For example, has your company made the unpopular decision to ban political talk in the team chat? That would tie in your main topic and the news.
2. Find a new book. Search on your topic keywords on Amazon.com...but instead of sorting the results by Relevance, use the drop-down menu to sort by Date Published. The books that appear at the top of the results are those that have just been released or are coming out soon. Check out the description, back cover copy, and the first few pages to see if there's anything you might use to freshen up your idea. If you predict this will be a popular book—for example, it's by a well-known author—you can capitalize on it even more in your content.
3. Get new stats. Look for a recent research study on the idea you want to write about, then adjust your previously untimely idea to reflect a trending topic.

It's not the worst thing in the world if your idea is not timely; you may have an evergreen topic your audience is always interested in. But if that's not the case, try these tactics to bring your idea into the present.

FILTER #3: UNIQUE

You want your ideas to be different from—and better than—what your competitors and the rest of your industry are covering.

If your idea isn't unique: Find a new angle. If you've ever looked at women's magazines, you may notice that every cover seems to be touting ways to "walk off the weight." The thing is, in every issue they tackle the topic from a different angle: walking off the weight after 50, or in the winter, or using hand weights, or reasons why you can't walk off the weight.

Do the same to pump up the uniqueness of your idea. Challenge yourself to come up with three different ways to address the same topic, then pick your favorite.

FILTER #4: SPECIFIC

By specific, I mean that you or your writer can cover the topic in the small amount of space you likely have—and that the idea is narrow enough for your audience to be able to really grasp it. For example, "Recruiting Leaders' Top 10 Problems...Solved" is too broad to fit into a blog post or even a full thought-leadership article. What you have there is a book.

If your idea isn't specific:

1. Slice it down. Take one small piece of the idea and expand that into a full piece of content. In the case of "Recruiting Leaders' Top 10 Problems...Solved," you might focus on just one of the problems—such as building authority, keeping new talent engaged, or onboarding and training.
2. Redefine your readership. Narrow down your audience to make the topic more digestible. In the case of the recruiting problems, you might focus on a particular subset of recruiting leaders, such as new recruiting leaders, female recruiting leaders, recruiters who are working at home during the pandemic, recruiters in a particular area of the country, and so on.

The good news about overly broad ideas is that once you start narrowing them down, you'll realize you have even more ideas to play with. Take the recruiting content we used as an example above: instead of just one piece of content you now have fourteen!

FILTER #5: SERVICE-ORIENTED

Service is a journalism term for information your audience can use (preferably right away) to improve their lives or their businesses or careers. No one wants to read reams of content on how amazing your company is. They want to know WIIFM: What's In It For Me?

If your idea isn't service-oriented: Consider how to address the topic in a way that will actually help your audience. Offer tips from your SMEs, incorporate sidebars and boxes with advice and resources relating to the main topic, or include a downloadable template, cheat sheet, or worksheet.

FILTER #6: SURPRISING

Surprising topics are the ones that grab attention. People get tired of reading the same old party line, so if your content is unusual and exciting people will want to read and share.

If your idea isn't surprising:

1. Be counterintuitive. Sometimes the easiest way to come up with a new idea is to take an old idea and stand it on its head. In other words, consider what is the opposite of your unsurprising topic. When everyone was writing heartfelt marketing content about our "unprecedented times," we created an infographic called "30 Creative Alternatives for Unprecedented." That quick graphic ended up running in several different media outlets. As another example, when peanuts were being banned from airlines and schools, I pitched and sold an article to Oxygen magazine called "In Defense of the Peanut," about the health benefits of the maligned legume.
2. Target an unjaded audience. Angle your topic for an audience for whom the idea is Maybe a topic would not be surprising to your advanced home chef persona, but it would be surprising to your new home buyer persona.

Once you've run your list of content ideas through these filters, and adapted them to fit at least the Relevant filter if not some (or all) of the rest, you should have a list of topics that are ready to add to your content calendar.

Don't worry right now about deciding on the SMEs you'll want to interview/get information from, figuring out who will develop the content, or doing any other research to facilitate your content topics. We will wrap this all up into the calendaring stage later.

But first, let's tackle the final brainstorming step: beefing up your calendar with some repurposed content.