Once you get down to the business of planning your publishing calendar, you’ll quickly realize that you need quite a bit of content in order to run a successful newsletter. You may find it easy at first to come up with topics. But once you’ve been publishing for a few months you may start to wonder: now what should I write about?
No worries – once you finish reading this guide, you’ll know how to generate a near endless stream of ideas, and how to choose the topics that your readers are sure to love.
To that end, we’re going to start by looking at where to get these ideas, and then we’ll end with a few tips for approaching the topics from a unique angle.
Where to Get All the Ideas You Need
Ideas for your newsletter are everywhere… if you know where to look. Check out these 14 ways to generate all the ideas you need…
1. Check Your Inbox
The first thing to do is see what types of content other people in your niche are sharing. Be sure to pay particular attention to those subject lines that catch your attention, as that’s a topic that’s likely to catch your audience’s attention too.
Depending on the newsletter, you may be able to pull multiple ideas out of a single newsletter, as some newsletters post multiple articles per issue. Still others only publish one article, but it may give you multiple ideas. (Such as a FAQ article, where every question is a topic that could become its own standalone article.)
TIP: Be sure to take a peek in your spam/bulk folder. Here you’ll see subject lines that are likely to spark plenty of ideas for articles.
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2. See What’s Trending on Social Media
There are multiple places you can get ideas from social media. Specifically:
Be sure to not only take note of the topic, but also the format (e.g., tips list, infographic, how-to article, etc.).
3. Do a Partial Google Search
The idea here is to begin entering your relevant keywords into the Google search box, and then let Google autofill in the rest. This will help you come up with topic ideas you might not have thought of on your own.
For example, if you type “dog training” into Google, the search engine will autocomplete with popular searches such as “dog training collars.” There’s an article idea for you.
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4. Use a Keyword Tool
The idea here is to insert your broad keywords into a keyword tool (such as WordRecon, MarketSamurai, WordTracker, or your favorite tool), and then look through the results list for topic ideas. Be sure to also look at the tool’s suggestions for related searches, and enter those as well.
TIP: If you don’t get suggestions for related searches, then do your own. For example, if you’re in a weight loss niche, you might search for the following: weight loss, lose weight, fat loss, dieting… and similar terms.
For example, if you search for a variety of terms related to weight loss, then you’ll get potential topic ideas such as “weight loss after 40” and “how to get rid of belly fat.”
5. Look at Popular Products
Go to marketplaces like Amazon, Udemy and ClickBank to look at popular (bestselling) infoproducts in your niche. You’ll want to check whatever information is available to you, such as the table of contents and/or the sales letter. Both of these should give you plenty of topic ideas for your next newsletter.
6. Browse YouTube
This platform has videos on every topic imaginable, so a broad keyword search (e.g., “dog training”) will help you generate plenty of ideas. Look at the main results. In addition, click on some of the videos and look at the related suggestions to the right of the video.
TIP: Focus on popular videos, meaning those that have a lot of “thumbs up” and positive comments.
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7. Review Forums
Visit popular, active forums in your niche to uncover potential topics. Look for the following:
How do you find these forums? Search Google for your broad keywords (such as dog training) alongside words such as:
You can also search for lists of forums that other people in your niche may have compiled. Here you search for your keywords alongside term such as:
E.G., “Best dog training forums.”
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8. Visit Q&A Sites
Another place to get topic ideas is on question and answer sites, as you can see in real time what sort of questions people in your niche are asking right now (as well as what questions they repeatedly ask over time). The top sites you’ll want to check include Quora.com, Yahoo! Answers and JustAnswer.com.
Every question is a potential article idea for you. In some cases, you may be able to pull several ideas out of a single question or its answer. For example, if someone answers with seven tips, each of those tips may be expanded to create an article.
9. Check Blogs
Your next stop is to check the popular blogs in your niche. Here you’re looking for the following:
In addition, read the comments on popular posts, as these will give you even more ideas for topics.
10. Read/Watch the News
In order to mine the most ideas from this method, you’ll want to turn away from the “front page” news and focus on the parts of the newspaper or TV news that are a little more like articles.
For example, in the winter you may see an article about tips for keeping pets warm. If you’re in a dog niche, then this is an idea for you to use during the appropriate season.
11. Visit the Newsstand
Another really good way to generate article ideas is to look at popular magazines in your niche. Take particular note of articles on the cover. That’s because major magazines invest a lot of time and money into figuring out what their audience wants, so the articles that will help sell the magazine tend to appear on the cover.
12. Repurpose Your Own Popular Content
Your next step is to look at your own content, such as your social media posts, blog posts, and newsletter content. In particular, focus on those pieces that were popular with your audience when you first published them.
Now look at how you can use that content to generate more ideas for upcoming newsletters. For example:
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13. Ask Your Audience
Another good way to get topic ideas is to simply ask your audience what topics they’d like to see in your newsletter. You can do this using a survey tool like SurveyMonkey.com, or you can simply do an informal survey by asking your subscribers, blog readers and social media fans an open-ended question about what sort of content they’d like to read about in your newsletter.
14. Create a Swipe File
As you collect the ideas using the methods above, you’ll want to start a swipe file. This is your personal collection of article ideas. You can generate this swipe file by saving articles titles, writing your own notes about what’s popular, saving screenshots of idea topics and so on. Once you’ve developed a file, then you can check this file whenever you’re looking for a fresh idea.
How to Create Unique Content
You just discovered where to get all the topic ideas you need to create as much content as you need for your newsletters. However, what you need to do next is take those ideas and make them your own. Here are three tips for doing exactly that:
15. Swipe Ideas from Other Niches
The idea here is to look at other niche articles on blogs, newsletters, and social media in order to get ideas for how to create a unique angle for your article.
Let’s suppose you’re in a dog-training niche. You might venture out of this niche to look at what people are writing in a horse niche. For example, if someone has a light-hearted topic such as “10 Reasons Why Horses Are Better Than Chocolate,” you might adapt it to your own niche (e.g., “7 Reasons Why Toy Poodles are Better Than Chocolate”).
16. Brainstorm Unique Angles
Another way to come up with a unique angle for your article is to do some brainstorming. One way to do this is to ask how your topic is like something else.
For example, let’s suppose your topic is social media marketing. You might ask how this topic is the same as or different than the following:
You get the idea – figure out how to compare your topic to something that most people are familiar with.
For example, you might come up with an angle such as, “How Facebook Advertising is Like Dating.” Then you might compare certain parts of both processes. E.G., creating an attractive graphic for your ad gets attention from the target market in much the same way a sharp dresser gets attention on a date.
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17. Create Unique Acronyms
Still another way to make your content different from what others are doing is to create a “system” or “formula” based on an acronym.
For example, the “AIDA” copywriting formula is a four-step system for creating sales copy. The four parts of this formula correspond to each letter in the word AIDA, and they are Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.
You can do the same thing with any multistep process. Simply choose a relevant word with a number of letters that correspond to a step of your process, and then find a way to make each step correspond to your acronym.
For example, if your word is “C.A.S.H.” and you’re writing about how to create “cash-pulling” sales letter headlines, then the first step (for the “C”) might be “Capture Attention.” The second step (for the “A”) might be “Ask a Question.” And so on to create the rest of your formula.
This is a simple method, but it’s a great way to put a fresh face on a standard how-to process.
Conclusion
As you just learned, there are two steps to generating topic ideas for your newsletter:
- The first step is to generate as many ideas as possible, mainly by doing research both inside and outside of your niche.
- The second step is to take these ideas and “freshen them up” with a unique angle.
If you follow these two steps as outlined in this guide, you’ll find that you can generate a nearly endless supply of topic ideas plus a brainstorm a fresh approach for each topic idea. Bottom line? You’ll never run out of unique ideas again!
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