Does this sound familiar?

When talking to clients, you’re clear, confident and can easily explain why their approach to a problem isn’t working and what they could do instead. But when you try to write for LinkedIn or your website, either your mind is full of ideas and you don’t know where to start, or it goes blank.

Trust me, I’ve been there, and it’s a common theme I hear whenever I speak with consultants and independent professionals about content creation. They have years of experience and expertise, yet struggle to write about it or turn it into engaging content. But I often find the struggle comes from not having a simple system for finding ideas and a plan for when to share them.

Below are three key tips for creating content that I find helpful and also share with my clients.

1. Identify your content pillars

Content pillars are three or four subjects that draw on your expertise and speak to what your clients care about. You can often identify them by looking for patterns in your work. Ask yourself:

• What questions do clients ask you repeatedly?
• What do you see people in your field getting wrong?
• What do you believe that others in your industry might disagree with?
• What kind of work do you want to do more of?

The answers that keep recurring are more than likely your content pillars. For example, a leadership coach might find managing difficult conversations, supporting managers, and preventing burnout come up frequently across those questions and choose them as their content pillars.

Another good way to test whether a subject should be a content pillar is to see if you can write about it every month without running out of things to say. If so, then keep it. For example, in two recent conversations with clients, overthinking came up as a barrier to getting started with content creation. I realised then that ‘barriers to getting started’ was one of my content pillars, as I could write on several things that stop people from creating content, starting with overthinking!

Defining your content pillars makes facing a blank page feel much less daunting because you end up talking about what matters most to you and, most importantly, your clients.

2. Build an ideas bank

Whenever I have a good content idea, it’s rarely at a convenient time, like when I’ve actually set aside time to write. More often than not, my ideas arrive mid-meeting, while reading someone else’s post, during the weekly shop, or worse, when I’ve settled down to relax for the evening.

To capture my ideas as they come, I started an ideas bank to keep them in one place. I use a notes app to jot ideas immediately when I’m away from my desk, then add them to a spreadsheet when I’m back.

If you’re stuck for ideas, these prompts can help:

• A question a client asked this week
• A project that didn’t go the way you expected
• Something you read or heard that you strongly agreed or disagreed with
• A small win, or a lesson learned the hard way

Assign each idea to one of your content pillars as you add it to your ideas bank. Over time, you’ll see which pillars are full of material and which need a little more attention.

3. Turn your ideas into a plan you can keep

You’ve identified your content pillars, and now you have a few ideas under each pillar to write about. Next, you should make a content plan.

A content plan is simply deciding when, and if necessary, where you’ll share your content. 

When creating your content plan, be honest about how much time you have. One thoughtful blog post or insight article a month, with two or three shorter social media posts drawn from it, is a lot more sustainable than posting daily for two weeks before tailing off. Consistency will always do more for you than volume.

It also helps to set aside a regular slot, perhaps an hour every couple of weeks, to choose a few ideas from your bank and map out what’s coming next. That way, when it’s time to write, you’ve already made the hardest decisions. 

Your expertise already shows up in client meetings, proposals and conversations. Content is just another way of letting more people see it.

If you’d like help shaping your pillars or building a content plan that fits around your client work, my content strategy sessions are designed for exactly that. 

And if you’d rather start on your own, open your notebook or notes app and write down the last question a client asked you. That might be the post you’ve been waiting to write.