Ahoy Shippers!
This week I used the Endless Idea Generator to generate 112 content ideas.
And I wanted to make a post breaking down the exact steps I took, the decisions I made and thought through, and my immediate next steps going forward. I know the EIG can be a bit daunting to start with, so I hope seeing it in practice clarifies any confusing bits.
The goal of my EIG session was to brainstorm everything I could possibly write about this year, knowing damn well I would never get to all of it. But the creative exercise of getting everything that's been floating around in my head and out onto the page was extremely liberating.
Despite generating 112 ideas, I emerged with crystal clear clarity for my next 3 days of content - and I'll talk more about why, despite having over a year's worth of ideas on the page, I walked away with only a handful.
I spaced out my EIG session over 4 mornings, blocking about an hour for each one. I do these by hand, away from my computer for no other reason than I think it's worthwhile to occasionally break out of your regular environment for real creative brainstorming. (I attached screenshots of my notebook just so you can see the raw material).
Last thing before we dive in. I kept one thing in mind while I did this exercise: No judgment of the idea quality during the brainstorming phase. The goal here was simply to generate the raw material of ideas (knowing I wouldn't end up writing about 90% of them). These were all options to write about - not obligations.
Alrighty, let's dive in.
Step 1: The 2 Year Test
I started the exercise with the classic 2-Year Test, asking myself a simple question:
What are all of the problems I've solved and topics I've learned about in the last 2 years?
And then I brain dumped literally everything I could think of:With all of this raw material out there, I consolidated them into a handful of buckets.
- Digital writing
- Journaling
- Balancing side projects with a full-time job
- Running, building, and selling a digital course and community
- My journey losing 100lbs in 4 years
- Beginner audience building
- Digital leverage
- General growth frameworks
- Managing your personal finances in your 20s
- Designing a life operating system (habits/frameworks/routines)
PS... Leave a comment with which one you'd be most interested in!
With these buckets created, I listened immediately for internal signals - which jumped off the page and excited me to dive into? This step is important. You want to narrow your focus into 3-4 buckets to start, and the right ones to pick will jump right off the page when you write them down - lean into that and latch on.For me, those buckets were:
- Digital writing - specifically how to build a daily writing habit
- All things journaling and asking high-quality questions
- General golden nugget growth frameworks
- All things digital leverage (a concept I've coined and am now exploring)
Now, I'll probably end up writing about all of these topics this year. But the important step is narrowing your buckets down to a few, and starting with the "internal signal" compass of picking the ones that resonate with you.
With these buckets outlined, I went onto step 2 - adding specificity to match my level of credibility.
Step 2: Adding specificity and matching credibility
So I emerged with 4 general, broad topics.BUT - for this EIG session, I wanted to generate ideas using the lens of *my own personal credibility*.This means I needed to add a level of specificity that makes *me* a credible expert in writing about this topic.
And this is the beauty of the 2-year test.I simply needed to add a level of specificity that makes the audience I'm writing to *the person I was 2 years ago.*
Take a moment to stare at that. You are adding a level of specificity that makes your target audience the person you were 2 years ago. So, here's how my buckets evolved:
- Building a daily writing habit for complete beginner writers
- Journaling for ambitious entrepreneurs who aren't yet journaling but know they should be
- General nuggets of wisdom for ambitious 20-somethings interested in personal growth
- Digital leverage for those who have never heard the concept before
Can you see how I cut out a *huge* number of people with my additions of specificity? That's the point. This helps me generate ideas *specifically* to solve the problems of my target audience.
You can add specificity in a number of ways
- Age
- Profession
- Background
- Gender
- Level of experience
I encourage you to dial these up and down until you feel *uncomfortably specific*, then add one more level. That's when you know you've gotten specific enough.
Now, onto generating the actual topic ideas.
Step 3: Using the 4A Framework to write headlines
With my buckets outlined, I went 1 by 1 down the list and ran them through the proven approaches to generate at least 5 ideas in each of the buckets.
Again, no judgment on these ideas. Get the raw material out there and then comb it over to extract the best ones after. I started with building a daily writing habit for beginners.
As you can see, I had quite a few ideas here - 24 to be exact (just for this first bucket, and I repeated this for all 4 buckets I generated).There's nothing new or special here. I used the proven approaches laid out in our EIG live session and went 1 by 1 down the 4As to generate headlines. Tips, ways, tactics, tools, mistakes, lessons, quotes, etc all of them are in here somewhere. Now, this takes us to the final step: choosing 3 of them.
Step 4: Choose 3 ideas, then start writing
This last step is perhaps the most important one.
You're sitting there with a ton of ideas on the page - and now you have the problem of potentially *too many* ideas to write about - which is better than having nothing to write about.
But many writers will fall into the analysis paralysis trap here - thinking about how they're going to store these ideas, which ones to pick, whether any of them are good or not, etc. (Side note - this is 99% a reminder to me because I am actively battling this right now!)
So - how to overcome this?
Pick 3 ideas. That's it. Your next 3 days of content. The 3 ideas that most resonated with you from that list. And that's all you're allowed to take away from these ideas (for now).Because here's what's going to happen. When you start writing about your first idea (that idea that jumped right off the page), it's going to feel effortless.
And in the process of writing, more ideas are going to jump into your head.And when you hit publish on this idea, the market feedback is going to generate even more ideas (if you're paying attention to the questions, critiques, engagement, resonance, etc.)
This is the main point of the EIG - to get you *started* writing about ideas that resonate with you. And once you're getting them out there consistently, it will be dead obvious what you should write about next.
Here are the 3 I picked:
- 5 Reasons Writing Is The Ultimate Tool For Personal Growth
- 7 Dead-Simple Steps To Build A Daily Writing Habit
- 4 Reasons Why Beginner Writers Should Start With Atomic Essays
Here's where it gets fun.From here, the EIG becomes recursive.Let's say that my 3rd topic - 4 Reasons Beginner Writers Should Start With Atomic Essays took off. I could then take *this idea* and feed it back through the top of the EIG and generate a ton more ideas all about this hyperspecific topic.
I'm doing this off the cuff as I'm writing this:
- 4 Steps To Write A High-Quality Atomic Essay
- 3 Classic Mistakes Beginner Shippers Make With Their Atomic Essays
- Atomic Essays vs. Twitter threads: Which is right for beginner writers?
- I wrote 30 Atomic Essays in 30 days. Here's what happened
Boom - now I have 4 more ideas, and again, and again, I can repeat this process!PS - should I write these 4 essays? Lemme know!
Step 5: Pulling it all together
Alrighty - I hope that was a helpful example to see the EIG in action. I did this for each of my 4 buckets and haven't been this excited to sit down and write in a long time.
In summary:
- Do this by hand to break out of your regular environment
- Start with a massive 2-year test brain dump
- Grab the 2-3 buckets that resonated most with you
- Tailor the specificity to match your level of credibility (i.e. your 2-year ago self)
- Use the proven approaches and 4A framework to generate at least 20 ideas
- Pick the 3 ideas that jumped off the page and excited you to write about
- Get started, write about them, and iterate from there.
We'll dig into *exactly* how to do this iteration during Week 3 - so stay tuned!
Drop any questions you have below and I'll be happy to answer.
Keep up the great work and keep shipping! -Dickie