How to Deal With Creator's Block

0:00Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top-level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. All right, we're going to talk about how to deal with creator's block, which is kind of like writer's block. So let me just set the stage for this one. When you are writing a blog post, when you're writing a note or whatever, it gets hard sometimes in the morning. Sometimes you have writer's block and you don't know what to do in terms of your content ideas or your topic ideation.

0:39So we're going to talk about how you can deal with it on a broader level, creator's block. Yes. So when you think about the overall creator's block, most people are like, hey, what content do I post on Instagram? What do I end up creating for YouTube? And what a lot of people are doing now is they're just using AI, like ChatGPT to come up with title ideas or concept ideas. But that doesn't really solve a lot of the creator blocks from what I'm seeing. what has worked the best. And I don't know if you do this, I actually look at like answerly profiles on social media and I see what other people within my space, not direct competitors, but other people in my space are doing.

1:18So for example, if I own a marketing agency or a performance agency, NP digital, I may look at a creative shop, someone who's doing like web design, app design, and it's an agency to see what they're doing on social media that may be working for them. and that'll end up giving us ideas because typically what works in other similar industries will work for you. You just got to try out new things. And that's probably one of the biggest ways we've gone around CratersBlock. The other thing that we do, if you have a lot of employees, people just can start brainstorming and we'll do like prizes where if we leverage one of the ideas, we'll give them some money.

1:55And if it does exceptionally well, from a performance standpoint, we'll give them a kicker cash-wise. When we had the office, we would do like a, I think it was a Tuesday, you know, we do a traction meeting to just focus on the content marketing team. And we would give everyone like one minute and we'd all bust out these post-it notes. And it's like, okay, write out all the ideas you have. And we post them all onto a wall. Right. And then we kind of just vote on them afterwards as a group. And sometimes I'd kind of like overrule some of the ones we'd vote on because they just weren't good enough topics, but that was actually really good.

2:26It was kind of crowdsourcing the ideas. That's building on what Neil said. Now I mentioned a tool called Hype Theory. That's what I use for creating Twitter threads and also kind of LinkedIn posts as well. So Hype Theory has been good because it will take the top performing content from your past, also from your niche as well. Let's say it's marketing or business and it will give you ideas to start with, right? Because oftentimes you just need an idea to roll off of. There's a Twitter list I have with critical thinkers, right? So these are people that I look up to. I respect, you know, they're independent thinkers.

2:57I like how they go about kind of articulating what it is that's on their mind. And I'll read from what they're talking about and I'll kind of try to figure out how does that fit in with what I'm doing? How does that fit in with my business? So your mileage may vary. I'm just giving you a couple of things that I've seen. Now, obviously, Neil has mentioned the chat GPT portion. What I found with that one is like, if you ask it like, hey, come up with some topic ideas for this podcast, this marketing podcast, that's not good enough. You have to get a lot better. You have to get a lot more targeted with your prompt.

3:25And if you're targeted with your prompt, then you're going to be able to get better ideas. For example, I played around with it yesterday and I was asking chat GPT for, I was like, Hey, you know, I've been trying to figure out how to like take the leveling up podcast to focus more on founders. Right. I was like, okay, you know, imagine this podcast is geared towards eight figure founders plus, and I'm looking for some ideas that will appeal to, you know, this audience, you are a, you know, founder that's exited for over $1 billion. What topics would be interesting to you, right? As an eight figure founder.

3:55And then boom, it like was really specific with me instead of giving me a really general answer. So you just have to be a good prompt engineer to get the most out of like a chat GPT for this type of stuff. Neil? The other thing that's really easy to do too is you just go and you just start talking to other creators. Like Eric does dinners. His dinners have gone really good compared to when he first started. It doesn't mean the earlier ones were bad, but he's learned how to continually improve upon them. And when you're just around a group of people, like let's say social media creators or content creators, you can ask them what's working, what's not, what are you testing?

4:29If you can't do this during dinners, you can set up WhatsApp groups, you can text people, you can share thoughts. Like this is the kind of stuff that'll help create a lot of inspiration. And you can have people in there that are in totally different segments or sectors than you are. So you're not competitive. And this will just help you come with a lot of ideas. Yeah. And by the way, like it can be in person if you want, but there's also like online chat groups, right? Like, so I'm in a chat group with a bunch of creators that most people would know. And also like, I'm in another chat group, like we're literally about to go to Turkey, right?

4:59To do like a mastermind and it's with a bunch of great people. They're all very accomplished. And so you get a lot of ideas by talking to people, not just around content, but around business in general, right? So it just depends on who you're talking to. And also look at your analytics. The last episode, we actually talked about, you know, short form versus long form podcasts. And we just talked about how like, we got a lot of signal from analytics, like surprise, by surprise, whenever we talk about chat GPT, that episode tends to do better, right? So take a look at analytics, figure out what resonates with your audience, and maybe sometimes produce more of that.

5:28But also make sure you're having fun at the same time. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and also subscribe to us on YouTube. And by the way, speaking about Founders Masterminds, levelingup.com slash founders, you can apply next event, August 7th through the 9th, which is in Beverly Hills, and we will see you later. We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool.io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success.

6:02That's marketingschool.io. Until next time, class dismissed.