At the beginning of this year I decided that I wanted to write weekly here on Metzgerbusiness.com. I’m very busy and knew that I would not have the time to think about topics weekly so I sat down and jotted down 52 topics. I knew if I wrote on each of those topics I’d be pretty happy with myself and this would be a good blog for highlighting my business knowledge.
It’s funny but five weeks into this year and tonight was the first time I actually looked at the list. I even picked a topic from the list to write about but then decided I wanted to write about the exercise of having written the list.
I realized when I was working on putting together my resume site at kevin-metzger.com that I hadn’t written here in nearly five months and it seemed time had just gotten away from me. I knew that not only could I but I want to write weekly on this blog about various topics related to social media, blogging, business, and marketing.
I also knew that it was sometimes difficult to come up with a topic on demand. So I decided to follow some advice that folks like Chris Brogan had given. That advice is to brainstormed for about thirty minutes and come up with ideas or topics. Heck Chris has even turned it into a business. He’ll brainstorm for you for $10 a month.
I decided that I needed 52 of my own ideas. Now I had a topic for every week should I need a topic. Without an ounce of thought I could go to my list and pick something. Some require more work than others but some are pretty straight forward and can be written in one quick sitting. A few topics even require that I go and do work to expand and sure up my own knowledge base. They are not a list of 52 have to write about the topic, but they are a list of 52 I can or want to write about the topic. But as I saw when coming up with this topic the list even supports another purpose. When I looked at the list tonight it helped me spawn another idea, it spawned this post and I realized the list is now an idea generator.
Now Let me try to explain why this simple exercise of brainstorming a bunch of topics for your blog in a dedicated, short time, done once works as an idea generator.
When you sit down and create the list you have to put yourself in the proper mindset. That is not always easy to do. You need to set the goal of a large number of topics. You have to think about the purpose of your blog and what you want to communicate. Then you come up with 52 words or ideas that express that purpose. Then when you sit down and read the list it brings you right back to the thought process and BANG! another idea just pops into your head that is completely related to your purpose.
You’ve actually put your thought process on paper and now when you read it your brain goes right back into the thought process thus helping you generate more ideas.
I hope this article helps you let me know if you have used lists this way.
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