Creative Inspiration In A Box

Was This Useful?

One of the things that I used to encounter when I was thinking of starting a business was the question “will I have enough to say on {the subject} to keep people interested?”

If you’ve ever asked yourself that questions (or one like it) then what I’m about to show you will help – and save you time.

It's important right – if you want to start a blog or write on a particular subject it means you have to write a lot of articles or create podcasts on the subject…You need to be informed, write well and consider approaching your topic from many different angles.

Let’s say you were going to build content around ‘camping'.You what are the subjects you can talk about?

Obviously you start with breaking it down into subjects like

• -equipment
• -skills
• -food
• -travel
• -survival
• -places to camp

That would make a good start.

The reality is that we are social creatures. We gain inspiration from each other; we get ideas by bouncing ideas off of each other.
You have your thoughts and experience and the person you are talking to, or reading has their ideas and new ideas get created in the Venn diagram overlap.

So let me share these two tools I use every day I need to write something:

1. Google Alerts – https://www.google.com.au/alerts

This great free service from Google lets you create automated ‘ears' that listen out for your keyword (subject) and let you know when and where someone is out there talking about that subject.

It means that you can find tons of conversations that are happening right now about your niche that you can read, participate in or use as inspiration.
Hot Tip #1 – try creating several alerts about different keywords or sub-topics in your niche.

You have two choices with alerts.

1- you can get alerts sent to an email address as an interval you choose to receive your updates. Or

2- you can have them delivered to an RSS feed.

(I'm going to suggest that you take the second option and use it with what I'm going to show you next)

Hot Tip #2 – you can also create alerts using your name, brand or website name.
This is awesome for keeping a track on conversations that are happening out in cyberspace about you and your brand.
(this is both great if it's positive and negative (for damage control), to answer questions people might have or to get ideas that people have for your business.

2. Feedly

This, without a doubt, has been one of the most useful tools I have picked up online.
Feedly is an aggregator and organiser for all the stuff you want to or like to read.
If you are serious about writing good content – buy a pro subscription to Feedly – it's not much, and you'll thank me for it.
With this tool you search out and subscribe to all the blogs, podcasts or news sites on your subject and it will dutifully serve them up to you as soon as they are published, all in one convenient dashboard.

You can organise your different subjects into folders which help you keep a track of what's happening and save the stuff you like for reading later.

Now here's the other cool thing about Feedly. You can create a subscription to any RSS feed.
Which means that you can subscribe to the Google Alerts feeds you have created. Anytime one of your alerts gets triggered it will automatically appear in your Feedly dash.

Because using these two tools means that every article or piece of content is tracked and saved on Feedly, you never miss an update, and you never have to go browsing all over the internet looking for inspiration.
It's huge time saver and one of those “once you start you'll wonder how you ever lived without it” kind of tools.

Go try them – get into the habit and save yourself a tonne of time.

When it comes time to write some article or create a podcast, and you need a little inspiration, it's a one-stop-shop. Head into Feedly read a couple of articles and by the time you've read a couple of articles you will have your own thoughts about those topics that you can write about and share.

 

Or, if you are just in the mood for reading and keeping abreast of other people's content you can use a range of sharing or bookmarking options to save the articles for later reading, note-taking or filing for future use.

Personally I use Evernote if it's something I want to file for later reference where I want to make additional notes, add images or even record a voice note related to the content.

If I just want to read it later at my leisure, I will share any article to Pocket, which makes the article appear on my mobile devices in a nice readable format.

Because using these two tools means that every article or piece of content is tracked and saved on Feedly, you never miss an update, and you never have to go browsing all over the internet looking for inspiration.
It's huge time saver and one of those “once you start you'll wonder how you ever lived without it” kind of tools.

Go try them – get into the habit and save yourself a tonne of time.