MBA2531 Q&A Wednesday: How Do You Come Up With So Many Topics?

0:05Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the$100 MBA show and welcome back to another Q &A Wednesday episode where we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners, followers, viewers. If you've got a question you want to ask, you can go ahead and send me one over at 100mba.net slash Q, the letter Q, and we'll get your question. Thanks so much. Today's question is from Rebecca, and Rebecca asks, I was wondering how you find inspiration for your next episode. You've done so many. How do you find your next episode topic? That's what I'm struggling with my own podcast. I'm trying to start my own podcast, and I'm not sure how to come up with all the topics for the show?

0:42That's a great question, Rebecca, because it really applies to any kind of content that you're coming up with. So I'm going to show you how you can have a steady flow of ideas, how I came up with over 2 ,500 podcast topics for this podcast over the last 10 years. I'm going to share my own strategies, my own methodologies, exactly what I do so that you could do the same. So even if you're writing blog posts or you're writing tweets or or you're creating videos, or whatever it might be, whatever content you want to create consistently, you got to come up with topics and ideas that are engaging, that are thought-provoking, that your audience actually needs.

1:17So I'm going to share with you how to do that exactly in today's episode. Let's dig in. But first, did you know that the average podcaster quits just after 10 episodes? That's according to a study by Blueberry. Podcasters often run out of ideas, they lose motivation, they lose that consistency, and therefore they fail. But you don't have to do that, right? You can shift your mindset. You can shift your approach and use the ideas I'm going to share with you today in the episode in today's lesson. Now, I want to just be frank with you. A big reason why I've had any success with this podcast,$100 MBA show over the last decade is because I've outlasted my competition.

1:55I've had enough systems in place to create the content I need to be consistent. See, it's not just enough to be motivated. You have to have a system so that you are consistent. So you are pumping out great content over and over and over. And that compounds just like compound interest compounds money in the bank. Compound interest will compound also in goodwill, in content, in your reputation, in everything you do in your business. So I want to share with you what has worked for me, what continues to work for me so that you can be consistent with your content and come up with great topics over and over and over.

2:30I use three key strategies to keep ideas flowing. And some of these involve a simple change in mindset, especially the first one. The first one is really about mindset. And I'm going to share with you something that I learned as a teacher. For those who don't know, I was an educator for over 12 years. I taught in the classroom five days a week, five classes a day. And one of the things I learned is it's more about how you teach than what you teach. It's not the what, but the how. Now, Now, I want to do a little exercise with me. All right. I want you to just take a moment and I want you to look back.

3:05Think back. Remember your favorite teacher when you were growing up. It could be in grade school. It could be in high school. Maybe it was that English teacher that inspired you. Maybe it was a PE teacher. Whatever. Who was your favorite teacher? Think about that teacher just for a moment. Think about being in their class. OK, was it the subject? Was it the information that they taught that you loved so much or was it about how they taught it? Think about that for a moment. It was probably more about the delivery, the way they made the subject come alive. The way they made you feel about that subject is what made all the difference.

3:39That doesn't change. Okay. That's what great teaching is all about. And that's what great content is all about. So you got to start thinking about, it's not really about what I'm teaching. It's how I'm teaching. And I can change how I teach a topic in different ways. I could deliver in a different way. And here's the thing I've learned in my years in education. Sometimes a topic is just not going to resonate. It's just not going, an idea is not going to just land in somebody's head in one way. Some people learn in different ways. They need to be approached to different ways. You need to present it in different ways so that they can actually absorb that information.

4:16Let me let you in on a little secret. I don't teach thousands of topics. I actually talk about 12 core ideas, 12 core topics. And then I change how I teach about that topic and the detail of that topic. So business is really just about marketing, sales, finance, team recruitment. There's 12 things that I teach over and over in different ways, in different depths, in different angles. And I'll explain more in today's episode, give you some more examples, but that's just the secret of any specialty, right? If you are going to teach any topic, whether it's a sport or how to play the piano or whatever it might be, you're really teaching a set of fundamentals.

4:56And it's not thousands of them. There are a set of fundamentals, a certain number, and then you change your approach. You change your depth in those fundamentals. For example, I might teach marketing, but there's so many things in marketing, right? There's so many different angles, different ways to approach marketing. I can teach content marketing, email marketing, all kinds of marketing, right? But essentially, the core principles of marketing will apply to each of these lessons, but I'm approaching it in a different way. But more importantly, when you're planning your next episode, your next piece of content, think about how you can teach the concept in a way that resonates with your audience in a different angle.

5:32Use stories, use examples, use analogies, use content that's relatable and engaging to them. I'll give you an example. One of the things I teach is finance and finance is a bit boring to talk about your profit and loss sheet and make sure you're profitable. Right. But you need to motivate people to learn this topic in a way that is appealing to one person. Like you don't want to be in trouble. So make sure that you have your numbers right. Right. So you don't get in trouble with the government or whatever it might be. That fear, that angle might resonate with somebody in one way. Some people might resonate with the fact that, hey, if I have a good, sound business with finances in order and I'm making a profit and my PNL shows me I'm making a profit, I can spend on the things I love.

6:16I can get more of a dividend. I can live the life I want. That's a different angle. So you want to make sure that you show the why and not just the how. OK, so when you're teaching a concept, why is this important and how to do it? I'll give you another example. Instead of just explaining the concept of marketing, I might tell the story of how we applied marketing principles, the thing I'm teaching you when I was running my business, Webinar Ninja, my software company before I sold it. Right. Show you the results. So I'm using examples. I'm using stories. I'm trying to approach people in different ways.

6:46The second strategy is same concept, different application. So I might teach a concept like email marketing and I might teach it because it's about how to grow your audience, how to maintain your audience, how to nurture your audience so that when you go to sell to them on a webinar one day, it's easy because they have built trust with you. They know who you are. So that's an application of email marketing, but also email marketing could be affiliate marketing. How do I send emails out to my list so that I can promote products and services and get some revenue? So that's a different application of email marketing.

7:21I might approach email marketing in a totally different way. Like how do the emails need to be structured? How often do you need to send emails? At what sequence or what time do you need to send these emails when you're launching a product? So as you can see, it's the same concept, different application. So you can literally come up with hundreds of applications with just one concept. And that's just email marketing, right? There's other marketing. There's, you know, paid marketing. There's social media marketing. There's video marketing, all kinds of marketing. and I can go ahead and do different applications for each.

7:51Let me give another example. Let's say I'm teaching goal setting and I'm teaching the concept of how to create goals, how to track your goals, how to achieve your goals. Now I could teach this as, you know, this is the new year and how do you set your personal goals so that you can achieve them by the end of the year? But I'd also could teach a different application, meaning how do you set goals as a team in your organization and agree on these goals and track the goals together, right, with a scorecard. But also I could talk about what about your own personal finance goals, right? How do you set those goals?

8:23So as you can see, goal setting can be broken into different applications. Now, the third and final strategy is a strategy I've been using for the last five years, and it's probably my favorite one. And it's called journal and teach. One of my favorite habits to keep up is a daily journal, a journal entry every single day. Now, you might skip a day. You might be traveling. You might be feeling like it. But it's OK. You could pick up where you left off. And my rule for journaling is just write down anything on a piece of paper. Right. This is my journal, guys. OK, this is my journal. And every day I try to write down something and it could be anything.

9:00It could be a worry list. It could be what I'm looking forward to for the rest of the week or the weekend. It could be a mix of my shopping list, all as well as my to do list, as well as a couple of things I need to remember. Right. But the point here is that when you journal every day, you're writing down the moment. You're writing down what's happening in your mind, what you're struggling with, some of the challenges you're having, some of the things you need to do, some of the things that have maybe are nagging you a little bit. And that's wonderful. And that's great to journal because you're externalizing these things.

9:32But what I love most about this exercise is going back and reading your journal entries. This is where the magic happens. OK, you can go back and I like to go back at least 12 months ago. I open up an old journal from a year ago or two years ago and I read through this journal because it's going to show me the challenges I had. And most of the time we forget the fact that we had those challenges and that we solve these challenges and we come up with solutions. We have a better life now and we have a better business. So these are lessons that you could teach. These are topics that you can share, how you overcame a struggle, how you have overcome some sort of problem that you had.

10:13And another thing is that sometimes you don't actually solve anything, but you just withstand it. Right. You just are able to endure it. And that's something that you can share. But journaling and then going back and reading your old journal entries are a great way for you to be able to come up with great topics for your content. For example, I have a journal entry back in 2017 where I wrote how much I was challenged by the fact that we needed to scale our customer support team. I turned that into a lesson later on on the podcast, how we were able to kind of overcome that challenge, how we made their first hire, second hire, hired a manager.

10:47I got people to help us recruit great customer support agents and grew our team. We doubled our team in a matter of six months, and it was a great achievement that I completely forgot about, but I remembered because I looked at my journal and saw the challenge there. The crazy thing about entrepreneurs and business owners is that we don't remember our wins very well. Remember the struggle sometimes? We kind of just move on. We don't look back. We just look forward. We just look into the future or what's next, but sometimes you got to look back for great content. You got to look back for those moments where you struggled or the moments that you overcame something or the moments that you actually had a shift in your mind or shift in your life or shift in your business that can really help other people.

11:30Right. There's no reason for other people to struggle if you can share some wisdom that you learned along the way. So start journaling daily and you don't have to make up some rules like I did of how journaling needs to be. You don't have to be, you know, some sort of official thing or dear diary or anything like that. No, you could be whatever you want it to be. It could be a worry list. It could be what you're going to do today. It could be maybe a lyric of a song that catches your mind. And then that kind of leads to another thought and another thought. Just take five minutes. Give yourself five minutes on the clock to write whatever you want in your journal every day and you won't regret it.

12:04It's going to be a great resource for great content. So let's recap. The first key strategy is to change your mindset about how you view content. A lot of us think that it's about the topic. It's about what you teach. but it's more about how you teach, how you are approachable, how you resonate with the audience, how you be yourself and show your care and show your empathy and show how much your topic matters to you, how passionate you are about it. There's a great saying in teaching that I love and I want to share with you and that's students don't care about how much you know until you show them how much you care, right?

12:39So showing people your personality, showing people how much you are invested in their success. You want them to actually win. And that really makes a big difference. Think about your favorite teacher. Okay. First one is mindset. Make sure your mindset's right about how you teach is more important than what you teach. Number two, you're going to take concepts, right? And you're going to have a different approach, a different way of showing them this is important. Show them how this can actually apply to their life in different ways. Thirdly, journal and teach. Okay. Journaling is going to be a great way for you to tap into your old entries and come up with great stories and great examples and great accomplishments.

13:16This is exactly what I do when I come up with all my topics for the podcast. Now, I want to give you a bonus tip. A lot of people try to do everything at the same time. They try to do all the steps of creating whatever they're creating in one sitting, and this is a disaster. This is actually not good for your creative mind. Let me explain. A lot of people, when they come to shoot a video or record a podcast episode or write a blog post, they want to do everything, meaning they want to come up with a topic. They want to outline the topic. They want to script it. They want to draft it. They want to publish it.

13:48They want to do everything all at once. OK, and that is not the way to do it. The pros don't do this. If you look at great movies, great series, TV series that you love, if you look at great music, that's not how it's done. Right. It's done in batches. So what you want to do is you want to batch your idea phase first. So you come up with all your topics in one sitting, or maybe you can come up with all the topics in the next three months in one sitting. Okay. Then you script in one sitting, right? And then you might go through that script a few times and then shoot, right? And you might want to batch shoot, right?

14:24So I'm shooting this video right now, or I'm recording this podcast episode. This is not the only episode I'm doing today, right? I'm doing several in a row because I'm batching. And that's the best way to come up with the best content because you're in flow. I'm already in the flow of delivery. And therefore, I can deliver better and better every time I shoot. Same thing when it comes to topics or ideas. When you're in that flow of ideas and coming up with great topics, you're going to come up with better, better ones and more and more. And that's going to be a great sitting where you're coming up with a whole bunch at one time.

14:54And then you can then implement these ideas when you're in the implementation mode in that flow. So batch your actual production and different stages. So that way you don't have to shift. By the way, that shift, that brain shift going from thinking and exploring and brainstorming and then writing and then applying that that shift, that cognitive shift is very taxing. It's very tiring. It's very difficult to do. And in a lot of ways, it will drain you. So you don't want to do that. You want to just stay in the same focus, in the same flow, in the same thing that you're doing, idea generation in this example, so that you can just keep on going and have more and more.

15:33And then you can take a break, go away. Maybe tomorrow you'll work on the next step of the process. Thanks for tuning into the$100 MBA show. I hope you found this episode valuable and you're ready now to keep your content fresh and engaging with more and more topics. So if you want more insights, if you want more podcast episodes just like this one, just go to our website, 100mba.net. You can find over 2 ,500 business lessons over there. I'm Omar Zinom, and I'll see you in the next episode. Take care.