National Blogging Month: How to Have a Productive Content Dumping Session and Get a Year’s worth of Ideas

Are you a blogger that wants to come up with a year’s worth of content ideas in a few hours? This is my guide to having an effective content dumping session. This guide is to help you get a year’s worth of ideas planned out while also keeping your content relevant to you and your audience.

More Blogging Tips: National Blogging Month: 4 Tips to Easily Plan Your Content

Clear Out a Few Hours For Your Content Dumping Session

Choose a Saturday when you have nothing else going on. Get a coffee (every good content-dumping session has coffee), put on a podcast or a playlist, and get to work. It’s crazy how many ideas come to you after a while.

Don’t Discount Any Ideas

Remember this is just a time to put a year’s worth of ideas in one place! You can weed them out later as time goes on. This is just a time to organize your thoughts.

Go Month By Month

I’ve talked about this before but try to plan your content ideas around the season or month. It’s crazy how much the time of year can impact your content. If you’re a food blogger, your recipes are going to look different in the dead of winter than in the late summer. The holidays also give us a ton of opportunities to create different content.

On Monday.com‘s content calendar I will make a group for each month and think of what I might write about that month. You don’t always have to stick to that month. If you see a post and you put for September but it would still work for another month that’s totally fine.

Think About Your Audience

What is your audience responding to on your website? Do the top posts have something in common? The answer is probably yes! Keep this in mind when you’re planning your content. This will ensure that you are creating meaningful content for your audience which will mean more hits to your website!

Look Back at Old Content for Inspiration

Don’t be afraid to look at your old content! This is where I get a lot of my ideas. Is there something from an old post you can revisit? Is there something you briefly mentioned in a previous post that you could expand on? Is there something from the old post that is outdated now? A lot of times keeping things fresh requires us to think back to what worked in the past and expand.

Realize the Purpose isn’t to Follow those Ideas Exactly

I typically do a content dump for a year. It’s an excellent way for me to get ideas, but I in no way intend to follow it to the letter. Sometimes what you thought would be meaningful or relevant to you six months ago isn’t now. That’s okay. You didn’t completely waste your time. A lot of times I look at those ideas and get inspiration to write a similar post that is relevant to my audience.