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Do you need help finding ideas and content for your podcast?
Show Notes
I need ideas for my podcast?! No, not me, but maybe you do! In this episode, I (Eric) talk about some of my methods for creating and developing episode ideas, and some brainstorming techniques.
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What is Practical Podcast Tips?
Looking for effective, simple and practical podcast tips? Are you just getting started with podcasting and not sure where to begin? Eric & Amber both give advice on helping you become a better podcaster using short, bite sized episodes. Podcasting can get challenging and exhausting, so doing what you can to make your time more efficient is one of the keys to maintaining your successful podcast. Stay consistent, stay effective, and grow your podcast!
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Eric Beels 0:02
Are you running out of episode ideas? Let's fix that. You're listening to Practical Podcast Tips. My name is Eric Beels. And today, I'm going to cover tip number 32. I need ideas for my podcast. Sometimes I get asked, I don't know what to talk about. And other times people just run out of ideas, you don't know where to go with your podcast. In this episode, I'm going to talk about ways to help overcome this, you've probably heard the term writer's block before Well, you know, when you're writing notes for your podcast, or even ideas of what to talk about, it is a form of writer's block, it really is. And I really think everyone hits this block at one point or another. I think everyone's really been there, depending on the the nature of your podcast, possibly. But I wanted to talk about the process on what I do all the time for coming up with with ideas for episodes or podcasts, this works for all kinds of things. And it's a really effective method that I really like using I use it on a regular basis. It also works for even coming up with names as well, if you're struggling with coming up with like a name for your podcast, if you're just starting out. And really whether you've been podcasting for a while, or if you're brand new, this is a really, really useful technique. And so what I call this, I like to call it a mind dump, but it's also known as like a brain dump. And essentially, what it entails is just right, just start writing, start writing, it doesn't really matter, what comes out that what comes out is is really irrelevant, it doesn't really matter. Okay, and you don't really want to think about that. So what I do is I'm a slow handwriting. Okay, I and my handwriting looks like it kind of came out of first grade, okay, so I'm not a fan of actually writing it down. But what I am a fan of is opening up like a Google Doc, or a notes doc or Word document, whatever you want to do just something to type. Now, if you're not a fast typer, then writing might be better. You could also bring up a like a dictation app. So you could bring up like otter.ai, that's a that's a dictation app. And that might work as well too, if you prefer speaking, but whatever method you use, the point is essentially to get information out of your brain. And onto a document. Okay, so what I do is I bring up a Word document. And then I just start typing ideas, okay, with the main with the main theme of what I'm trying to focus on in mind. Okay. So if it's like podcast ideas, I'm just going to start writing podcast ideas. And you can type in sentence form, if you don't want to build, build a list and just just start typing words. Or what I like to do is to build a list. So as soon as I type something, I just hit Enter, and then I just type something else. When doing this, there's two really important things to remember that are critical for this to be effective and work really well. First, is to remember that there's no wrong or bad answers, okay? So if you're doing this with somebody, which, which I highly encourage you to do it with someone as well. So if you have a co host, sit down with them and do it and do it together. But remember that there's no wrong or bad answers. Okay, this is purely to just get information on paper. So then you can look at it later and then analyze it to see what is going to be good and what isn't. And maybe it's all good, it might all be relevant things, but it's helping you kind of organize it right. So there's no wrong or bad answers. The second thing, try not to slow down, okay, try to get things out as quickly as possible. Because it tends to be where, if you if you slow down, and writer's block can start to set in a bit more. Try to think quickly, just getting your brain moving and thinking it's like going for a jog like in the morning, it gets your blood going, right. And then as you get going, you start thinking of more ideas and more things to talk about. One thing I wanted to mention, I actually found a kind of a cool app if you if you guys are if you're daring enough, there's an app on iOS called don't stop writing challenge. And what's kind of cool about this is it's, it's built to help with writer's block. And they have an interesting idea where if you stop writing for I think more than like five seconds, it deletes everything.
So puts the pressure on to not stop and you just tell it like I want to keep writing for nonstop for five minutes or whatever it might be right? And then you just go and so it It's meant to like put the pressure on to keep going. So if doing this still isn't working, maybe you can give that a shot. I have no affiliation with the app or anything. I've never used it myself. But I thought it was an interesting idea. And kind of a fun take on note taking. And just getting information from your brain and onto onto paper or a sheet or something. Yeah, so I find that this is such an effective thing to use for name ideas, podcasts, name ideas, as well. And it can be applied to really anything when you just need to brainstorm and get ideas out. And to remember to not think anything's Oh, that that's a bad idea. No, no, no, don't think that, then not put it down, put it down, you can always delete it and remove it later. Super important to not like judge something immediately. Okay. And this, this is what we did for this podcast. And we ended up coming up with four, four pages or so yeah, four pages. And that gave gave us a fantastic starting point on things for us to talk about on this podcast. And once we kind of go through all these, I'll do it again. And I'll go back through and I'll Okay, what what are some things that we may have missed? Or maybe we didn't get detailed enough in and just just go through it and start writing ideas down. I hope this episode helped you cure that writer's block, and you come up with some great ideas for your podcast. I'll see you in the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, feel free to leave us a review. I'd love to hear how it helped. Also, if you know somebody else that could benefit from it. Go ahead and share it with them. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.