Out of ideas again: how to come back when the well runs dry
Six months of posts have gone by and now it feels like you have said everything. It is the most common feeling, and it is almost always false.
You did not exhaust the subject: you exhausted the list
At the start you noted ten ideas and published all ten. Because you never rebuilt the list, it feels like the well dried up. The well is your work, and it produces new material every week.
The proof is simple: you served customers this week, and they asked things. That is the list refilling itself.
Five places where there is always material
Twenty minutes in any of them and the list has ten lines again.
- The last fortnight's conversations, read only from the customer's side.
- Your own old posts, to split one into three.
- What went wrong this month, told by the person who fixed it.
- The questions in a competitor's comments.
- What changed in your trade since you started.
Repeating is not running out of ideas
The most important subject in your business deserves saying four times a year, from different angles. You got tired of it long before your audience saw it once.
Rule of thumb: if you feel embarrassed about repeating it, that is a sign the subject is central. Repeat it.
The list before the writing, always
Whoever makes the list once a month never goes through this. Whoever writes post by post goes through it every month, because each post starts with the hardest question of all.
Keeping the list in one place, adding to it during the week, is the difference between having material and having to hunt for it.
The list built from what you already told about your business is the starting point of every ReadyMonth month.