If you can spare 10 minutes for 10 slides, check out our guide to generating new ideas for content and your website and avoid creative block.

1. Heart Internet’s Tips in Ten
Idea Generation
You’re just ten slides away from brainstorming
better ideas quickly and easily.

2. Timing is everything
• Time management doesn’t improve efficiency;
focus management does.
• If you’re not interested, you won’t succeed.
• Forcing ideas doesn’t work: you need a
starting point to avoid wasting time.
• Give yourself enough time for what you want
to do, or it will show.

3. Online sources of ideas
• Has to be something you’re genuinely interested
in to produce a good result.
• Incorporate with social media (searches,
trending topics, popularity) so ideas are brought
to you.
• Play with existing content in experimental ways,
e.g. reduce a blog post to a single tweet, turn a
video into an infographic, and so on to get a feel
of how ideas can branch out or be simplified.

4. Offline sources of ideas
• Get off the web – books, films, magazines.
• Get out of a rut – take some photos, go to an art
gallery, visit somewhere new.
• Get out of your comfort zone – find out more
about a topic you’re not familiar with (e.g.
typography, hardware).
• Get into other industries, particularly creative
ones.

5. Brainstorming ideas
• Have clear aims and objectives.
• Start with the intended audience rather than the
topic (psychographic profiling).
• Create a list of broad topics, segments and hooks
to break down further.
• Keep a list of great headlines/post titles for
inspiration & reworking.

6. Brainstorming through visuals
• Pick an image representing a strong
emotion/theme.
• Use mind drifts, associations, or pair up with a
practical concept/specific audience.
• Note ideas/pairings that you don’t use this time.
• Can be adapted for pop culture.

7. Ideas through problem-solving
• Find a good, representative source of your target
audience.
• Identify their problems and use them to spark
ideas.
• Perfect for helping your visitors identify with you
and creating search engine friendly content based
around questions/topics they’re interested in.

8. Child ideas
• Once you have one good idea, adapt it:
 Make a series/follow-up
 Change the segment
 Change the hook
 Change the experience level
 Change the platform
 Change the medium

9. Analysing good existing ideas
• What makes it good?
• Who is it aimed at?
• How is it beneficial to the brand?
• How could it be beneficial for your company?

10. Using existing ideas
• No idea is original.
• How could the existing version be better?
• How would you have done it differently?
• How could the idea be adapted (different
audience, season, medium, etc.)?
• How could your company do it?

11. Organising ideas
• Keep organised notes of articles, campaigns etc.
and highlight what’s interesting/why you picked it
out.
• Organise by type where you can – e.g. ‘social
media contest inspiration’
• Private Pinterest boards with comments are
perfect for visual media. Project management
tools such as Trello are better for text.