How do you keep your blog ideas creative, engaging and overflowing?
If you’re struggling to come up with fresh, edgy or compelling content (in the form of blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.), then read on to learn two brainstorming techniques that will give you more content ideas than you know what to do with!
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The Lotus Blossom Framework
Coming up with interesting content ideas around a single content topic is tough.
But that’s where the Lotus Blossom Framework comes in. It’s the easy button for brainstorming dozens of blog ideas fast.
The Lotus Blossom Framework helps you to:
- Structure thoughts and ideas around one specific topic, and
- Explore other associated content possibilities.
Your Lotus Blossom brainstorming begins by writing a core topic word, from which you can generate 8 associated topic words or phrases (lotus petals).
Each one of the 8 lotus petals you just thought of is then used to create new blossoms where the process is repeated:
In Michael Michalko's book Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques, the author speaks about creativity and generating a multitude of ideas based on the Lotus Blossom Framework.
Keep repeating this process as long as you need to until you drill down into some really incredible ideas. You’ll have dozens to hundreds of content ideas after just a few generations that started with just a single core word!
To get the most out of this brainstorming exercise, keep reflecting on what your audience members struggle with, their commonly asked questions or general complaints.
But don’t stop there…
Once you have several new content ideas, you can run it through the Content Multiplier technique to amplify a single idea into several content angles...
The Content Multiplier Technique
This special brainstorming technique requires that you filter your new Lotus Blossom ideas through a set of content category perspectives.
These content categories include:
- Actionable Content
- List Content
- Original Content
- Analysis Content
- Story Content
- Rant Content
Each content type brings with it unique questions or approaches, which help you multiply a single topic into several more unique content ideas.
Let's dive a little deeper into what each content category is and how you can use them to generate even more content ideas.
Using the Lotus Blossom Framework, Hanne came up with the content example Ebook, which is an associated idea linked to both the core topic 'List Building' and sub-topic 'Opt-In Offers'.
And to help make the following content examples you’ll see more tangible, let’s assume we’re running the topic Ebook through the Content Multiplier gauntlet...
Type #1. Actionable Content
Actionable content deals with 'How to ...', 'Way to ...' and 'Mistakes not to make ...' style blog posts.
This type of content tries to persuade your audience what actions to take or advice to follow in order to reach a favorable goal.
When you apply the actionable content category perspective to a topic like Ebook, you’ll get additional content ideas like:
- How to Create an Ebook
- How to Find a Topic for Your Ebook
- How to Create an Ebook Cover
- 5 Mistakes Not to Make When Writing Your Ebook
Type #2. List Content
List content is exactly what it sounds like — content you can make a list articles about. Often these lists revolve around things like books, podcasts, tools, etc.
When running the topic Ebook through the list content multiplier, you’ll get examples like:
- 5 Tools You Can Use to Create Ebooks
- 5 Tools to Create Ebook Covers
Type #3. Original Content
Original content is simply content you create based on your own research.
Running the Ebook topic example through this content multiplier should give you ideas like:
- We A/B Tested Multiple Ebook Covers to Discover What Designs Convert Best
Type #4. Analysis Content
Alternatively, analysis content is content created around your analysis and commentary on someone else's content.
Apply the analysis content perspective to our Ebook topic gives us new idea examples like:
- 10 Ebooks That Kick Ass at Converting Visitors into Subscribers
Type #5. Story Content
As the name suggests, story content is based on telling a story around a topic. It can also be story content about someone else, like an interview you did with someone.
Good examples of story content ideas for the Ebook topic would include:
- How We Generated 1000 Leads with a One-Page Ebook
Type #6. Rant Content
Finally, rant content is created by choosing a certain topic and simply going on a rant about it.
Rants usually center around industry news, trends or misconceptions about something.
This type of content often sparks commentary — both for and against — the position you take in your rant articles, while also building a stronger connection with your audience.
Rant content is a great way to create a personal brand.
With the Ebook topic, rant examples might include:
- Why You Shouldn’t Create an Ebook for Your Opt-in Offer
- Why Ebooks Are Dead
- Why You Shouldn’t Spend 5 Days Creating a 200-Page Ebook
Unlock Your Blog Idea Blockages
With both the Lotus Blossom and Content Multiplier techniques under your belt, you’re now equipped to start generating engaging content ideas quickly.
Use the Lotus Blossom Framework to generate quality ideas and then apply Content Multiplier technique to ramp up the quantity of ideas around a given topic.
And if you need help transforming your ideas into great content, consider taking our free Thrive University course:
Do you use other techniques and strategies to come up with engaging content ideas?
If so, we'd love to hear about them in the comments section below!
This was SO helpful! Thank you Hanne.
Happy to hear Adam!
Brilliant Hanne! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Maggie
Hi Hanne,
I’m wondering…
Coming up with blog articles is one thing…
But how do you know if anyone will want to read that?
If no one will ever search for the topic in Google, then you have an article that probably very little people will read.
Or is that something you don’t find important?
Hi Harry, it’s true that I will always first start from what I believe would be helpful for my target audience before thinking about Google… Main reason for this is that in many topics page one is dominated by big SEO players and it will be hard anyways to break through there. That’s why having a clear voice and building up a fan base that loves your content and your opinions is a valid strategy. However, if in your industry you can realistically win some spots you should give it a go. In that case, I would use the lotusflower to build a list of possible keywords and then do keyword research to see which one would be a good one to go after.
One could just mix “helpful content” content with “seo content”.
There is always a potential of getting some good, targeted traffic through long tail phrazes.
In addition to content multiplayer one could add “media multiplayer” to this strategy and go big on social (it’s so much easier to find good, free traffic on youtube than on google search)
Fantastic tutorial, saving this and will use it over and over again!
Glad you liked it Jean!
Thank you for the excellent article and excellent response to Harry’s question. Your method reminds me of some software I wrote years ago to automatically multiply topics and generate headlines for the same purposes that you describe.
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that in many fields, interested customers will scope out the top 10 providers that interest them by doing more extensive searching and reading. Then they will explore the websites to investigate a closer match to their needs. In that case, all the multiplier articles demonstrate a depth of knowledge that will probably be respected by the viewer.
When did you say Thrive Themes will provide an automatic title-and-blog-article generator for doing this, or some template pages for the different types such as listicles, etc. Kind of like template sales pages, but blog pages instead.
Gad, automated blog articles – can we say Content Shock (the book)?
Hi Kevin,
Not planning on offering an automatic title and blog generator anytime soon 😉
Thank you so much! This helped to clear a block that I’ve had for 2 years about how to write more blog posts related to my website services. Branched out into other topics, but that made it harder to sell services. Using this technique, I wrote down ideas for 36 blog posts in only a few minutes.
Yay! Happy to hear!
Yes…very simple concept. I have helped clients build “content maps” which are similar but not as illustrative on how they all tie together in one simple chart…great idea.
It got me thinking that this should essentially be broken down into keywords and use those keywords as categories or tags in WP so that it is always easy to search on your top areas for posts and to easily see what I’ve written in the past. With over 500 blog posts, I don’t always remember whether I have written about a topic or not so this would make it much easier to find. It would also allow me to send out a link to people for that category so they could see all the posts I’ve written on a specific topic…further helping them navigate through the maze and get exactly what they want.
If you have other ideas of how to use this, let me know…thanks again. Always great hearing your ideas…that’s why I love Thrivethemes!!
Sounds like a great idea!
Those are some great ideas for brainstorming. Thanks! These will be useful for coming up with blog post ideas as well as other creative ideas for anything really.
Hanne, (or now Toni or Christine) I had to watch this video twice with 12 month time between to fully understand the brilliance behind it. Thank you thrive (and Hanne!!!!) for educating your clients so well!