speaker 0:   0:00
the secret of coming up with amazing block post ideas on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by thrive themes, blazingly fast WordPress templates and plug ins. Bill to get more traffic, more subscribers, more clients and more customers to you To find out how thrive themes can turn your blogger Web site into a money making work of art, go to serve no master dot com Backslash Drive Themes Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. I'm constantly trying to refine and improve everything about my business. There's this one way of running a business and teaching which most girls employing most people in my industry employees, which is where they act like everything's perfect. Their business has always been perfectly. Laws be perfect. They started making money from day one, sometimes that they have of the story where they started off struggling. But then things got good, and once they got good, they never had bad days. And part of that journey is very inspiring to say, Oh, man, it could be perfect and that someone who's been on both sides of the wall and if somebody's been in this business for a very long time and knows a lot of people often perception reality are quite different. The other way of running your business and leading your business is to be more honest and more open about your experiences and the opposite down, so that when people have those ups and downs when they have those down days, they're less likely to feel discouraged. And one of the areas where people often struggle is running out of ideas. What should I talk about? What should I block post about? And they will see my blocks and podcasts and, well, this guy's a genius. He always has ideas. How could one guy couple of five ideas a week and today I would open up a little bit about my process and show you some of the tools and secrets that I use, and I actually don't pull all of my podcast ideas out of the air. It's a mix. Lately, most of ideas have been coming for research. Now it's back and forth, and the next episode is actually something that I came up with as my own idea based on an experience. But we go back and forth and I want to show you some of the research tools. I used to come with blood posting podcast episode ideas so that you don't feel overwhelmed. There are a lot, a lot of websites out there with lists of hundreds of amazing post ideas, and I looked at tons of them and most of the garbage I'm always looking for New resource is for blood post ideas. I'm always looking at different tools I can try out, and I'm trying to couple of new, really cool WordPress plug ins that I don't quite have enough experience with yet to give you feedback one way or the other. But they're doing some interesting things with my writing, but before I kind of cover those things, try the last few days, I wanna make sure that they work there actually worth talking about, But for block, post ideas actually do a lot of research every day. I have my little notebook with me right now, and I have this paper notebook that I use, you know, very simple. When those things that cost, like 50 cents or dollar at the mall and get at the night and set store, it's not fancy at all. In fact, the page with these episode notes on it, my daughter Artie, drew circles all over it. That's hardly hard to read. It had told an extra lamp, even though it's sunrise here because I had trouble reading through all the little note she made on the page. So when I record my episodes, I used this notebook. And so every time I have an idea or a fine idea line I right into the notebook when I've discovered today is that this is the last idea of the notebook that I really like right now. So as soon as this recording finishes, I'm gonna have to go back and look for 10 more ideas that I want to tell you the ways they get ideas, the way I get my inspiration. It's not from whole cloth of a lot of what I look at is, what are people talking about? You were asking about what's relevant, what are good ideas. And it's very interesting to see which episode also get a lot of feedback. Some episodes which hit the most feedback or ones that I was unsure of releasing I earlier on around Episode 40 did it episode on depression. That's actually got me a lot of really positive feedback, which is amazing. I was very nervous, or at least because some people would say, Oh, it's not that directly relevant but my messages for more than just up and coming authors my methods for more than just innit marketers a space. It's really for anybody who wants to take more control of their financial destiny, more control of their living situation. I've always wanted since the start of this podcast to do a lot of travel episodes talking Maura, Maura about the experience of traveling in the world, and I finally did my first travel episode recently about a specific location about plan. Oh, Carmen, I'm excited about that episode, and hopefully you liked it came a couple of episodes ago. I really want to do more things like that, MME. Or Episodes, where I talk about different travel locations and I want to do more interviews. A part of that is getting really, really head with episodes for a long time. I was recording episodes the same day they were coming out, and it was causing a big problems. And now I'm finally a couple days ahead. And as long as I stay about 45 episodes ahead, which means I'm recording Friday's episode on Monday I have a new team to help me with, writing out my notes because that's been slowing me down. Had having that release will allow me to do more things to improve podcasts, work on other things. I don't like having to the content twice. You may have noticed if you read my show notes or the block posted goes each episode. Sometimes those are really good, and sometimes I'll be honest. They're not as good as I want them to be. I get exhausted because I've already done the topic. Once I try to think of new ideas, I don't want the show notes to be identical to the podcast episode because that's boring. I want to give a little bit of value to the people who come and only have time to read the post. That's just my perspective, but getting a little help means I can focus more and more on my ideas. So there's some of the ideas I have coming down the pipeline. I want to do more interviews now that I have a really solid foundation of nearly 70 episodes, right around 70 episodes, and I want to do a lot more talking about, traveled some of the other topics and give people more, more perspective on different ways to improve your life. You know, the great thing about the little carbon episode was said about that is it. You can cut your cost of living. I used to live in Tampa. The cost. Living from Tampa to Plato, Carmen it's a 90% decrease. So the life you could have in Tampa making $10,000 a month is the life you could have a plan to Carmen making 1000. But that's not really true, because if you factor in the change in your tax situation, it's actually about how much money to spend and you can actually taken even bigger pay cut. You could actually lose, like 93% of your income and still live the same life played a common or pretty close to it. That's amazing. And that's why I want to share more things because it's still really it's right. It's like, Oh, here's another way. You could have a good life without having to spend as much money. It's another different angle controlling what you spend and control what you make of the two ways to really affect your lifestyle. So I'm really excited about that. But some of the ideas for that episode came from doing research, and I've always been a fan of Little Carmen. I talked about my trip there before I loved it. I went there for spring break 10 years after what else does, and I just absolutely loved it. Actually, I spent a long time thinking about moving to play in a car, but it was one of my plants to try out at the end of the world trip. I accidentally ended up living where I live now, but it was on my list of places where I might just live permanently to cover block post ideas. One of the sources that I use that I'm still missing around with perfecting is cora dot com. The cool thing about Cora is it's so active. That's the first thing amazing about it now. I always seen core when I do search results. So I've always known for a while that it's a website where people write questions than other people give answers. Now Yahoo answers used to be the gold standard for this, but somehow Cora got on the scene, and now that's the place people go on. A lot of businesses actually make their entire living from answering questions. Accord the answer questions that have a link to their website, other products and it's very interesting. Provide that kind of time. I would probably do the same thing, but to spend all day answer questions. It's a lot of time. It's very interesting to see this business bottle, but what's great about core is if you actually join, it's a totally different experience. When you join. Cora doesn't cost a thing. You have to tell them 10 topics you're interested in, and every time you say topic, you're interested and they show you more and more than a related to it. So I ended up joining, like 120 to 150 topics, anything that I would be interested in talking about on this podcast for my blood post episodes and what you can see all the questions people are asking. Now I see a good idea for an episode about one every 50 questions that pop up on my news feed. But that's okay. I could scroll through his 50 questions in like, two minutes, so it's pretty good at finding me some interesting ideas. And I have a couple of new ideas coming down the pipeline that I think I'm gonna pull it over the next few episodes I'm writing in my notebook. I did see one that I liked, and I was kind of 50 50 and I realize now I didn't write it in my notebook Classic Mistakes. It was last night when I was thinking about talking about court today, so I'll go back and do that. But what's really great about it is you can see questions to pull Rascal. You can see how popular it is a little bit, and they have really good ideas. Not every question is really great. Plenty of them you just could never make into an episode. But that's okay because you could scan through so quickly. And I really just picked all the things that I thought were really relevant to what I want to talk about. You know, I added a bunch of travel one's some backpacker ones because backpacking is often about how to travel in a budget which is relevant to talk about traveling money. There was some basic water sports ones. I marked a few climbing woods because I do like talking a little bit of hiking in that type of sport. I've done a little bit of mountain climbing like Level one. If there's 10 50 levels around climbing after the level one, where you going up a slight vertical more than hiking because there is a bit of face touch. But like that level is what I like to d'oh. That's my little experience. But I also found and added myself what I was sitting in my court, two tons of topics that have to do with startups that have do the angel investing that have to do with starting a business becoming an author, starting a podcast, all these different topics so that we could just scan through, and sometimes something interesting pops up. I just add it to my little idea notebook and have a big page of ideas. And then once I have an idea, I kind of like I go through and fill it out and write in six or seven, sometimes only three solid bullet points I want to cover on the episode. Where is a great resource? It's free, and once you set it up takes about 10 minutes. You can easily scans her cubs over ideas all the time. And when combined with some of our other tools, you can find some really amazing stuff. The second tool is read it, which is very popular place To find out what people are talking about. You could find topics that are trending. What you want to do is find if there is a subreddit that's really relevant to your topic. Your category, your niche. If you're in a fixed bicycle space, you love about fix bicycles, and you could find a good read it with enough people. Then there's lots of information about fix bicycles. I looked at some of the stuff for my main topics here. There's not a lot of great information about being an author and podcasting. It's often what's your favorite podcast? So there's not a lot about creating podcasts. Read it right now, other than talking about tax, which is boring. You don't want to talk about your podcast hosting solutions all the time. These episodes, it's to drive a topic. I use lips, and that's it. And there's only like two or three choices. The rest of moral, terrible for it will hurt your business. So it's a really short discussion, but that's the kind of stuff that's popping on Reddit. But if your other topics, if you're anything other than an Internet marketing or how to make money in line or build a business type space, there's some really, really good stuff on red. Part of the reason for that is red. It is very much anti commercialization. Unlike war, where every answer ends with a link to some of business on Reddit. People don't do that because of it. Commercial space, red it's not. It's useful for me. Sometimes I come up with ideas on there But mostly it'll be in ideas that are little secondary to the main thing for travel. It's got lots of lots of great stuff. So my travel ideas are coming from Reddit. There's other places like Quick Sprout that does the same thing. They'll help you come up with ideas or they let you type in your search and then really cool things come up. I also like depictions. I'm using a lot before I've talked about Buzz Sumo, but but similar. It's always trying to get you to buy, and it's 100 bucks a month. It's not quite worth that for me. If it was something like 2030 40 I'd probably buy it. But for $100 a month, even if I come with idea every day, I paid $3 per idea. It's a little more than I need to spend for ideas depictions, but I'll have to post a link below because the leak is so weird. It's like depictions that epic beat dot com or something crazy like that. What I like about depictions lets you do about 10 searches a day for free comes up with stuff very similar to bust sumo and it lets you do. One thing that's different lets you choose your article type, and I say, I say I want to see list Icka lt's about blogging, about podcasts, out being an author about travel and that really Alps me. Because lately, as you may have noticed on the podcast, I'm doing more and more and more lists doing more moralistic ALS numbers because people really respond to those. So I do like what depictions? Doing more than any other tool for this list I've been using depictions the most over the last 10 to 15 episodes has for the strongest presence. I think going forward there's gonna be a little bit more core of extend. The depictions is still one of my first resource is, I think about it. Pictures is again. You could only do five or 10 searches a day, so I have to use it every day to come with a few more ideas. They're also tools like Portland Content Idea generator. With a tool like this, you type in a seed word, you typing to wonder where, like I want to write about surfing, and it will come up with three words that go around three phrases to go around it like top reason. Celebrities are surfing around the world and new comes up a phrase like that. You keep hitting, reload until comes up with when you like. It's pretty interesting because it actually comes up with really compelling headlights like it's so strange and so unexpected. But it turns out that what we respond to it headlines is very, very, very particular. It's a lot more for Blake that I knew, and I'm working on doing a lot more of that with my ideas there. A lot of similar tools like this. There's block post titled generators and there's a whole bunch. I'll post a couple things again and you could find load. They all do the same thing. Some of them you type in your ideas. Some of them just generate random ideas and have a fill in the blank. There's about 10 or 20 and they all do something very similar. I don't think you need to be using 10 or 20. The reason I'm not a huge fan of these is because you don't have to go do a bunch of research anyway, so it kind of comes up with a cool title. But then you have to come up and say, Oh, can I actually think of seven things? A lot of it's like the 14 Instagram profiles you must follow to be inspired about surfing a lot of those ones because they're very popping. Those get socially shared a lot. If you have, like instagram things, you should follow Twitter feeds. You should follow things like that. Those types of lists do very, very well. We see him all the time. There's a reason they trend, so you don't have to go and find those seven Internet profiles you actually want to record. The people follow. As someone who uses Instagram of the loosest sense of the word, it will be very hard for me to find seven people that inspire me. I'm not even sure of the people that I'm into. How many have actually use Instagram? I have so little time to spend consuming that I very rarely consume people's free content. I'm in the middle right now, going through three different, very advanced Facebook courses by one of my friends by someone else, who I think might be a really super duper genius. and one of my other friends in that course. So I'm in the middle of going through stuff that I paid for, that I don't have time to constantly check other people's instagram feeds and things like that. And it's hard for me to want to look at pictures when I'm standing outside and watching the sunrise in a tropical paradise. It's about as good as it gets. It's hard for me, too. Find other pictures inspiring when I'm in that situation. When you're looking for your block post ideas and you're trying to find the right idea, sometimes nothing just comes up, which is why I like to separate the idea face from the creation phase. As I mentioned in the past or previous block post, I really like to use the WordPress draft feature every time I have an idea. I just make it aware Press post. I just save it as a draft so no one else can see it except for me. But I can log in and look at all my drafts. I can just click on this one. This is drafts inside, where President shows me all my ideas. That's how I store my block post ideas, and I do separate podcast of block post ideas. The reason I don't have a bunch of new podcast India's My notebook is actually yesterday I found three ideas. I thought, All three, these air better is black posts, then podcasts, So those are all saved in the computer. What's good about that is that you can do little things to prep the episode when you're ready to ride. One of things that I do is I'll add in the image for the episode and what I'm doing now. I've kind of realized I want to improve some of the ways I'm blocking. One of the things is that I have these cool images, but they're not as share a ble trying to do better about that because, you know, I'm not a big social meeting. I'm trying to move into Facebook more and more, so you get to see that experience. I've always been a content marker is pure content. I find people through J B S S E l. A couple of things, but I really need thio increase how well I'm doing social media and you're going to see more and more of that as I make a lot of changes to the blogger that a lot of changes, mainly, I'm gonna change the size of the images so that they're perfectly sized for Facebook, and I'm just doing more research on that. But it comes from ideas. I go, I want to have a blockbuster on episode. Talk more more about Facebook and some other things that I'm doing and I do a little research goes back and forth when you have these ideas in a big list. When it's time to, then go write a block West. It's very easy. The hard thing is, when you have a deadly I gotta write of, like, post today, and you gotta have the idea and you got to ride in the same time. That's tough. Coming up with a really good idea is not that easy. I have a bunch of ideas I have about five Block Post outlined out inside my notebook five podcast episodes in this part of my guys notebook that I don't wanna record right now for a couple of reasons. I I don't think it's the right time in my episode sequence is one of the biggest ones I've done a couple of technical episodes recently about WordPress about backing up your website about some stuff like that, and I don't want to know too many that are just about that. And so couple the ones that have left or more ideas about working on your block. And I don't want this to be purely about blogging. It's like we have a little trend here. It wasn't intentional. Even this episode. Rights up block post ideas, so I don't want to go back to back more more block ideas. I want to talk about other things that are interesting. So that way you stay engaged and you stay interested. So it's finding that balance. And that's why I have my big list of ideas that I have the episodes I've kind of blocked out, and you always want to continue to add to your list of ideas. So maybe just every week you have an hour where you write down all of these new ideas you have, and you can also do a lot of competitive research. Read Blog's in Other Niche is not your own that you find interesting. Read blog's about travel, read blog's about This and that and sometimes we get inspired. You'll see. Oh, this is an amazing thing about seven reasons to try scuba diving, and you can change in seven reasons to try something else that you like Talking about this will allow you to come up with a really, really good ideas. This will allow you to be creative and to see what other people like. I love to see what's trending. The reason they use depictions a lot as I can see what topics people find engaging and interesting. And I'm doing more and more to make my website more more really social friendly. One of my challenges has been for the last few months. That podcast is It takes up a huge amount of my creative bandwidth, coming up with ideas every week, recording five episodes every week, which is anywhere from 102 150 minutes in recording on finalized content. That's a lot. And then I have to write the description of each episode, so that takes up a lot of thinking recording and then riding time. And now that I'm going to switch to having someone else help me with the notes, it means that I'm gonna start writing more and more block post mixed, and I don't want my blawg to just look like it's a podcast listing, which is what it looks like right now. If you scroll through the first page after the second, it's all podcasts. I'm not happy about that because I wanted to be a real mix and what people to read a lot of really good content as well. And so I'm excited about this little change in direction that I'm making that I think will be very valuable. So I'm working on constantly improving things, and having really great block posts will make it easier for you to share awesome stuff on Facebook. I'm constantly trying to prove every little piece as I buildings have a big any 20 guy. To reason I'm successful is that I put out a lot of stuff that's not 100% finished. Instead of waiting another three months to be finished, I could've waited till right now to release my first podcast episode because I've been perfect 100% ready. But I don't want to do that. I'd rather get stuff going. And in tomorrow's episode in the next episode of talk a lot about some technical hurdles and what to do when things go bad, because another one of the big lies that we hear from all the biggest gurus is that everything goes perfectly. They very rarely share stories about when things go bad, and I happen to know that things have gone bad for lots of these guys in different places because that's life. Life doesn't get to a point where you never have struggles and never have challenges anymore, and it's very important to me, too. Prepare you for those moments so that you don't become brittle. You don't think I'm the only person ever had This bad thing happens very excited about the next episode, and I can't wait to share it with you. I've shared a few today of my tools and resources in the ways that come up with Block Post ideas, and I'll post a bunch of links in the show notes to some of the tools I mentioned in some of the other tools that are out there that are pretty cool for coming up with podcast title ideas and things like that. So I'm very, very excited and I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's best seller, serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to the serve. No master podcast. Make sure to subscribe so that together we can achieve true freedom.