The key to a successful blogging career isn’t to come up with an endless pool of new ideas. It’s more about how well you execute what you already have.
Only if someone had told me this when I was a newbie; could it save me from a world of stress and anguish.
You can’t keep coming up with unique and fresh ideas every time. And if you try to do so, you will burn yourself out and never get anything done.
Sure! A good idea can be a solid bedrock for not just only good content but also a profitable business. It makes the process easier for you. And it makes the end product more marketable to your demographic.
However, a good idea doesn’t guarantee you great results.
It is only one side of the coin.
If you want to make yourself a dependable blogger, entrepreneur, or even an employee, you must pay as much if not more attention to the execution.
It needs significant practice time, which you don’t get from waiting for great ideas to hit you. So, do yourself a favor and…
Wanting to work only when you have the right idea is a variation of perfectionism.
And it can cost you.
That is because you can’t come up with good ideas out of thin air.
If you really want to have better ideas than most people, you have to know, consume, and process more stuff than most people do.
You will need more clay if you want to make more bricks.
So when you are out of ideas, it’s because
➊ You have either reached the peak of what you already know
➋ or can’t rediscover your ideas from different angles.
In other words, you have reached a point of stagnation. No. Clenching your fist and shouting at the clouds is not going to help.
Make no mistake. The goal is to make things better. So, you better ease up on yourself, lower your standards a bit, and get back working.
Don’t stress or obsess over the idea of ideas. Instead, feed your mind well.
Read a book.
Watch a video essay.
Take notes.
And enjoy your life.
All you have to know is that you don’t have to produce the best possible results every time. It’s okay to have a few duds along the way.
At least they will keep you going. And then, when you come up with a good idea, you will be in better shape to utilize it well.
I love how well Jari Roomer defines it:
First of all, the more you write, the better you get. Second of all, the more articles you publish, the higher the odds that one of them will generate a lot of views or even go viral.
Here’s another way to make it harder than it needs to be. That would be to distance yourself from your audience or your market.
It is a mistake most novice bloggers and even some wannabe entrepreneurs make. They end up putting their own selfish artistic and financial needs before the needs of their market.
To them, “what do I get out of this?” is a much more crucial question than “what my audience or customer needs?”
When you do that, you end up standing on the wrong side of consumerism. That’s when people exploit your desires against you by selling you $1000 pre-packaged crap in the name of mastermind course materials.
Sooner or later, they go down.
That’s how it pans out because these poor souls start with a misconception. They think people will eat up whatever content or product they put together for no other reason than they have produced them.
In reality, your target audience doesn’t care about you or your aspirations. All they care about is how you are going to make their life a little easier.
So whenever you are looking for new content or product ideas, put your market first. Ask yourself, “who will benefit from it, and how?”
I can’t help but quote Neeramitra Reddy here:
Success lies at the intersection of “What do my readers want?” and “What am I good at?”
Here’s some news. People come up with all kinds of ideas all the time. Most of them don’t do anything about it. It’s because they neither have the intent nor the expertise to make anything out of those said ideas.
At the end of the day, your skillsets, your mastery, and your drive to get things done make all the difference. And you need all three of them.
⁃ Without a unique combination of skills, you will have limited opportunities.
⁃ If you are not good at what you do, you will always remain ordinary.
⁃ And if you lack the intent, you will break under stress whenever things go south.
As Scott Belsky rightly points out in his book, Making Ideas Happen:
An idea can only become a reality once it is broken down into organized, actionable elements.
So it does come down to your ability to get those things done.
When you know how to convey the same message in 10 different ways to evoke ten different emotional reactions in your readers, you can make even the most obscure ideas relatable.
On the other hand, if you are lousy with your presentation and execution, even the best idea in the world will fail to gain any momentum.
Besides, getting into action will provide you with much-needed exposure for generating new ideas that you simply don’t get from sitting around and waiting. In Steven Johnson’s words:
The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
Earlier in this article, I had suggested that when you run out of ideas, it can be because you have nothing new to offer with what you already know.
That’s when you need to stretch beyond your comfort zone.
But why even bother?
As a content creator or even an aspiring entrepreneur, your job is to keep up with the market’s demands. And the market is ever-changing, fast, and most importantly, shared.
When you are pondering your limited options, others are crashing their boundaries to meet the market’s expectations. Every second you waste being complicit is being used by your competitors to drive your target audience away from you.
And if you want to get them back,
‣ you have to know things they don’t,
‣ be good at kinds of stuff they are not,
‣ and solve problems for them that they can’t.
Naval Ravikant said it the best:
I would say that the most important skill to get rich is to become a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn. There should be no book in the library that scares you.
That’s because when you become super efficient at several things instead of being moderately good at only a few things, you
① have a bigger pool of topics to explore
② and get way harder to replace or compete
Most writers don’t get much mileage out of their content. They post something once and then never use that post as a resource ever again. Smart writers use the work they’ve already created to their advantage.
— Ayodeji Awosika, How to Always Have Something to Write About
Have you improved your craft in the past few months? Did you learn a few new things along the road?
If the answer to both the questions is yes, congratulations, you are ready to re-discover your old ideas with a newer perspective.
All you have to do is:
✅ Take an old topic and present it with new facts and packaging tactics you didn’t know back then.
✅ Pick individual sections of your listicles and turn them into specific articles.
✅ Use many smaller pieces as an ultimate guide.
✅ Re-purpose the headline structures that have worked well for you in the past.
So, no. You don’t always need new ideas to start working on something meaningful. In fact, it works the other way around.
The more you engage your mind in solving a problem, the more dimensions you are willing to explore; the better ideas you attract at the shower.
After all, action wields better results than non-action.
And you rob yourself of all the good things when you use your lack of ideas as an excuse for your non-action.
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