Build a Content Idea Bank You’ll Actually Use
Building a content idea bank is an important part of your content system because it’s where your ideas develop. An idea bank, also often referred to as a “content bank” or “content idea bank,” is a repository of your collected and curated ideas. Your content idea bank is your personal repository to capture your thinking behind a content idea and not just a list of ideas.
I believe that great content begins with great research. If you need help, I’ve put together some research tools you can use that will help you validate ideas, generate new content ideas and add insights into the topics you’re exploring.
I preach this because when you spend time curating and feeding yourself ideas and perspectives from different verticals, you start to form your own connections, ideas and opinions. You start to bring stronger arguments, deeper thoughts and more context to your audience.
When you have a rich content idea bank, you’ll notice your topics form a big, related web, and you can explore them from different angles, bringing more evidence, research and insights that create fresh perspectives, sharper connections and deeper conclusions.
As you keep capturing comments and questions from your audience, you’ll eventually see which areas frustrate them, what roadblocks keep them stuck and what wins they are celebrating, which will make you more informed, confident and consistent in your ability to help your audience and have a successful business.
When ideas, epiphanies and downloads come your way, and you don’t capture them properly, someone else will bring them to life. Or worse, you end up starting content from scratch every time instead of referring to your content idea bank.
Creating content ideas from scratch is unproductive and can cause you to create random or rushed content. You want to treat your content as part of a cohesive thread of ideas, and that can mean that some messaging, ideas and concepts are repeated and re-explored through different angles. Your content bank can help serve as a repository for this.
Today, I want to walk you through creating an idea bank that you’ll actually use so that you can capture inspiration and generate amazing content ideas to bring lasting value for your audience and business.
A content idea bank is an essential part of your content system because it stores your raw working titles, theories, concepts, inspiration and early drafts before you produce them.
The role of your content idea bank within your content system
A content idea bank is where you capture and develop your ideas.
Once you have your ideas organized and fleshed out, you’ll ensure that your ideas are aligned with your content strategy. Your content strategy will be a filter by which you evaluate whether your ideas are worth pursuing. Using your content strategy as your main anchor, you’ll determine if your ideas support your business goals and your audience’s needs.
As your ideas are refined and aligned with your content strategy, you’ll then move your ideas into your content calendar, where they move from ideation to execution with format, due date and platform publishing details.
This process is all part of your content system: 1) content idea bank 2) content strategy 3) content calendar, as each of these works toward helping you move your content from inspiration to aligned action.
Related: 5 Step Process to Help You Generate Endless Content Ideas
What does a content idea bank contain?
A content idea bank is going to contain working titles, hooks, questions from your audience, follow-up topics and other inspiration that you can take from ideation to execution.
What should you include in your content idea bank, and how can you structure your content bank?
Your content idea bank can include questions, anecdotes and lessons learned from client calls. Here are some specific ways you can structure your content idea bank.
Details you can capture:
- The core idea: What is the core observation, idea, topic or concept? Capture the essence of the idea and why you thought it was important, relevant or inspiring. Capture this detail because if you write down a random string of words without context, you’ll forget why it mattered.
- Context: Was there a specific word, stat, study or unique detail that caught your attention or that you want to explore further?
- Your perspective: Is there a unique angle, emotion, or thought that you want to tackle? What is your interpretation of this information for your audience? What are some of the questions, connections or solutions you can offer?
- Links / Evidence / Source: What is the link to the comment, question, article, study, visual or chart? Capture where the idea came from, such as direct messages, customer feedback, comments, personal journal or reflection, competitor reviews or other details, because this will help you evaluate and determine your confidence in the content idea later.
- Audience pain points: Frequently asked questions, pain points, emails, direct messages, comments and DMs from your audience.
- Hooks and captions: Working titles, hooks, words that caught your attention, swipe posts and content that you want to remix or expand on.
When you’re capturing an idea, it’s not the time to judge or analyze quite yet. Instead, focus on capturing the essence of the idea so that you can later draw on related connections and curate this into your content.
This is optional, but you can also include details such as which platforms you’re planning to post this to, the content pillars this ties into, how you repurpose this content or screenshots, links or tags about your sources of inspiration.
How to get started with building your content idea bank
1. Determine which tool you’ll use to capture ideas
When it comes to capturing ideas, you have several options. You could start with a regular notebook, your notes app or other tools such as Evernote, Notion, Airtable or ClickUp.
You might even consider using an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets. If you prefer more visual note-taking options, you might consider taking your ideas into Milanote or Miro to help you organize and connect your notes. You could also use voice notes if you prefer to capture more stream-of-consciousness ideas and epiphanies as they come.
The point is to make your idea-capturing process as easy and frictionless as possible. This might look different for everyone, but the point is that you begin by identifying the tool you’ll use to document your ideas.
Try to keep one designated place for storing your ideas and use a tool that is frictionless and makes it as easy as possible for you to capture your ideas.
When looking for a tool, consider whether it makes it easy for you to use tags, categories, filters or even include a status for your ideas (i.e., captured, developing, ready to execute, published or archived). Tags could include topics or whether it’s a book, podcast, course, research article, etc. Categories could include details such as content pillars, themes, topics, products, customer feedback, frequently asked questions or topics. If you use a notebook, you can use Post-it notes, page flags or highlighters to help you capture themes and topics.
2. Capture the essence of your idea
When an idea comes to mind, be sure to include exactly what prompted you to want to capture this. What was the thought behind it, the connection or the context behind it?
When you input your idea, make sure it’s more than just a title and URL. Instead, you want to make sure you emphasize writing down the essence of what sparked your idea. Including this will help you in the future when you return to your content idea bank. Finally, you can also include the potential angle you’d want to take with this idea.
I’ll use an example of a brand activation I saw on social media involving Salomon shoes and a journaling event.
Here’s an example of what this might look like in your content idea bank:
- Core idea: A shoe brand is using third spaces with a local influencer to connect with journaling enthusiasts.
- Source: Social media link to a video of an event
- Observation: This event helps journaling enthusiasts connect with the shoe brand’s audience. The content creator’s audience is exposed to the shoe brand in a casual, positive way.
- Question: Why does this collaboration feel relevant to this audience?
- Interpretation: The shoe brand is connecting itself to something that this audience already does and values. Walking, self-care, mental health and journaling!
- Potential angle: What can small businesses learn about marketing through aligned partnerships?
Make sure you maintain a good idea-capturing hygiene. This means writing down as many clues as possible about why you had the idea in the first place. Was it a certain word you read, a headline or a study or statistic that sparked an idea?
Be specific about why this idea came to you because it will leave clues for the future. One important caveat: filter your content ideas through your content pillars to ensure they stay relevant to the topics you discuss, what your audience cares about and what complements your products, services or other offers. I recommend filtering your content ideas through your content pillars.
Related: Maximize Content Pillars for Your Marketing Plan and Content Creation
3. Organize weekly and on an ongoing basis
Now that you are capturing ideas in your idea bank, it’s time to sift through your ideas and make connections between them.
As Steve Jobs said in a speech, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” Having a content idea bank means setting aside time to review the content ideas and inspiration you have gathered.
They are all clues into new ideas, concepts to develop and problems to solve. You have to collect the dots before you can connect them.
Start by spending 15 to 20 minutes every week to organize your ideas. This process can include adding tags, categorizing ideas into content pillars, themes, or other labels to help you make more sense of the ideas you’re saving and why. This means that when you go back to review your content ideas every week, you leave notes, comments, content angles, potential ideas, content series, campaign angles, product ideas, or details that your brand or business can explore or expand on.
Here’s how you can approach your content idea bank workflow:
- Review: Revisit all of the ideas you’ve captured since your last review.
- Organize: Add tags, incorporate missing context, related ideas and potential angles.
- Connect: Look for recurring themes, questions and ways you can connect ideas back to your business and audience’s needs.
- Decide: Determine whether an idea is worth pursuing, developing further, saving for later or archiving.
A weekly organizational sweep helps you determine whether certain ideas are promising, need further research or refinement, or can be expanded. Over time, your content ideas will help you deepen your understanding of a topic, and you’ll be able to develop more perspectives to help your audience.
With a content idea bank in place as part of your content system, you can stop brainstorming ideas constantly and randomly and instead do it during designated time frames.
This weekly workflow helps you draw better connections, expand on your ideas and start to see the throughline between the questions, comments, and inspiration that can help you provide value to your audience. If an idea isn’t quite working at the moment, you can always set the status to “archive” instead of deleting it from your list of ideas, and you can always return to it for a future exploration or iteration.
Pro tip: This won’t function properly unless you have a solid process for capturing and storing ideas. This means you have to get into the habit of proactively capturing ideas as they come your way and also committing time every week to organize and evaluate your ideas.
Make your content idea bank more than just capturing ideas.
As you start to develop your content idea bank, remember to always add in your own perspective to the idea.
Make space to capture feelings, thoughts, analysis and your unique angles and understanding of what you are capturing. This critical analysis of your ideas will take something from generic to a unique angle that you can discuss. This is because one person may see or hear the same piece of information, but each will interpret and analyze it in a different way.
Regularly reviewing your ideas helps identify which ideas are most aligned and worth pursuing.
Adding your notes and observations will make your content bank more effective in the long run because it will surface recurring themes, questions, common pain points and unique case studies about your mistakes or hard-learned lessons. Your idea bank will be a well-curated repository to help you produce highly valuable and relevant content, offers and solutions that will be tailored for your audience, content strategy and business goals.
Takeaways
- A content idea bank is where you capture and develop your ideas. Develop your own content idea bank so it can serve as a repository of valuable, relevant content that supports your audience’s needs and business goals.
- A content idea bank is an essential part of your content system. Use this as the first step in your content development process, then ensure alignment with your content strategy, then move your validated ideas into your content calendar.
- A weekly workflow of evaluating your content ideas will help you avoid randomly brainstorming content ideas. As you maintain your content idea bank, it will help you deepen your understanding of a topic and develop more perspectives to help your audience.
Related articles:
