Hey,

Time for a new class today, and we’re continuing the Idea Generation Course with this here Lesson 7, which is all about being on alert in order to really get better at content generation.

You already have the proper sets of tools, right?

You should have by now an Editorial Calendar that you are using, you have Trello Boards on which you can place ideas that you generate, you have a way to filter out if the way you wrote your content is actually going to be Okay and many more.

Oh, and you also received some productivity tips to help you out in dealing with all the new ideas and key activities you have to perform in order to generate more AND better ideas.

Keeping up with the News in Your Industry

In order to generate more ideas you, as a content writer, have to read a lot more than any other person on this wonderful planet of ours. Well, that’s great, but it can also wear you out real fast.

You’ve probably seen that when you first started creating content for your wordpress site it was amazingly simple to come up with brand new ideas and things you wanted to share with the world, so idea generation wasn’t a real issue for you.

Back then, it was so simple for you to tell stories, because you basically had a huge amount of stories inside of you just waiting to burst out and see the light of WordPress page. Great time!

Then, as time went by, and your scheduled articles got published, you realized that it was starting to get harder and harder to keep up with your general business objectives, so it became even harder to keep up with creating new content for your website.

Now let’s say for a minute here that you did manage perfectly to do all that (even though be both know it hasn’t been a walk in the park). Even with managing to keep up with business objectives and with keeping your readers happy and satisfied with brand new content, there’s one thing still missing: Getting refreshments!

Feeding Your Intellect

It’s like you give and give and never take back. And it’s wrong. Well, not for me, obviously. It’s wrong for you and it’s certainly not a sustainable thing.

If you keep giving and never getting anything back into your brain, you will let be drained. Completely. Pam-Pam!

Yes, this is the main reason of the course and of the classes I’m teaching you right now. Idea Generation will help with this refreshment part. But you need more than just Headlines and general ideas.

When you keep losing track of all that’s new in your field, you won’t get only a drained brain, you’ll also get a hard time getting back in the game, so you’re compromosing your whole content writing activity by not keeping up with the news and feeding your intellect with the latest things happening in your and your readers’ world.

Be on Alert for Better Idea Generation! More like, Google Alert really

I’ve got some great news for you. In this lesson and also in Lesson 8, you will find some really cool ways to help you stay on top of all that’s new in your industry.

For today, you’ll learn about Google News and how to set it all up to work awesome for your idea generation process.

1) How Will This Help?

By setting up Google Alerts on certain topics that you usually cover regarding your industry, you will get daily (or weekly) the best things that have been written about that topic. What’s important here is that all the stuff you’ll be getting is current, so you’ll really learn what’s new by doing nothing at all to research what’s been written lately. Google Alerts will do that for you.

2) You spend less time trying to find out What’s been written recently in your industry, because Google Alerts will do that for you.

Yes, I just re-stated what I said earlier. Wanted to make sure you get the time benefit of all this.

What I’m teaching you right now is an efficient method of reducing the time you spend on coming up with new content ideas. It’s always important to find new ways to reduce production time, so that you don’t get overwhelmed.

3) Setting up your own Google Alerts to rock out and feed your intellect

– Go to google.com

– Login with your Google Account (since you’re a content writer I’m pretty sure you already have one 🙂 )

– type in google.com: “Google Alerts”

– You’ll see an entry called “Monitor the Web for interesting content”. Click it!

This is what you get

In search query, you will type in one of the topics that you generally write about.

Let’s say you usually write about “cooking recipes for dinner”. Type that topic into the “search query” field.

Great!

Now play with the other settings that help you decide how you want the alerts to be sent to you.

You’re all done. You’ve just setup your first ever Google Alert

4) Now setup alerts for all the other special topics that you cover.

The more precise the topic, the better and more targeted results you will get (and also more relevant articles will be made available for your reading).

Next time: more ideas on how to keep up with the news and the latest posts from your industry

Okay. It was great having you in class today. You’ll get some more great tips in the next lesson on how to rock your idea generation and forget about ever feeling drained and helpless in the face of new content that you have to build up.