If you want to write for magazines, story ideas are your bread and butter.
The days when big editorial staffs thought up most of the ideas and simply assigned them out to freelance writers are over. Instead, these days overworked editors are looking to their writers to tell them what’s fresh and interesting out there.
You want to be the writer with a million story ideas, to earn well.
Despite this, I often hear from writers that they’re stymied because they have no ideas.
Let’s fix this! Once you know how to troll for ideas, it becomes a fun hobby. Get out your favorite tracking software, whether it’s an app like Pocket, an Excel spreadsheet, or (like me) just a plain ol’ Word doc, and start developing your idea-finding skills.
These days, you don’t even have to leave the house to come up with a lot of great ideas, because so many online tools can help stimulate your brain.
Ready to fire up your computer and find some great ideas? Here’s my list of creative idea-finding tools (in alphabetical order):
1. BuzzSumo
This is a fun site for spying on competitors, and seeing what’s getting the most traffic on a particular topic. Just pop a site name or keyword into BuzzSumo‘s big search-engine box, and see what you get. The free level will get you a dozen results on a topic.
2. Digg
Using a site such as Digg, that’s curating what’s hot online, can really be a timesaver. Once you sign up, you can customize what Digg will email you about, or use Digg Deeper to get notices about the most-shared stories from your own Twitter timeline to help you quickly zoom in on interesting topics.
3. Diggbot
Don’t have time to poke around on Digg? Me neither. But you don’t have to visit this content-curation site yourself to learn what’s hot.
I use Slack to communicate with my team, and discovered there’s a Diggbot that will pop a digest of hot headlines onto your Slack thread each morning. You can also add the Diggbot to Amazon Alexa or to Facebook messaging.
Here’s a look at the little digest it delivers to my Slack each day:
Click into one of those entries, and you get Digg’s daily Morning Edition, full of tasty popular stories:
4. E-newsletters
You subscribe to these — you know you do. At one point, I had a cache of more than 100 of these babies, sitting in my email inbox waiting to be read!
There are many ways to troll your e-news for ideas, including simply scanning all the subject lines you get. If you read through those emails, ask yourself about how the topic of that e-newsletter could be developed into a feature story, a guest blog post, or some other format.
5. Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups are a great place to ask questions, gather facts, find sources, and watch trends on any topic you’re looking to write about. For instance, hanging out in a self-publisher’s Facebook group helped me identify several good topics for posts on the challenges of self-publishing and making sales on Amazon, including this one.
6. Google+
If you’re like me, you haven’t been spending a lot of time on here lately to leave posts or share things. But Google+ is definitely still a great place to brainstorm ideas. Click on ‘Collections’ to get some quick topics you can browse, join Communities to eavesdrop on topic-focused conversations, or Search for ‘What’s hot and recommended’ for more.
7. Google Alerts
This was my bread and butter anytime I was doing business blogging for several different clients at once. Just set up a Google alert on each niche topic, get an email a day, and you’re set to write newsy posts about what’s going on in that industry.
8. The Latest
This automatically-generated list of what’s hot on Twitter can be a fun place to shake up your idea-finding habits. My recent visit to The Latest brought me links to stories on everything from iPhone addiction to problems with Uber’s drones. You can sign up to get notifications — or just follow The Latest on Twitter, where it posts all its picks.
9. LinkedIn Pulse
Many freelance writers are posting (or re-posting) content on Pulse for the exposure — but have you thought about mining it for new article ideas? There’s a ton of great content on here, which when you’re logged into your profile is curated by what your connections are posting. You can also go to the Pulse homepage to see Pulse ‘Editor’s Picks,’ see what’s trending on Pulse that was posted by major magazines, and more.
10. LinkedIn Groups
Join LinkedIn groups that focus on the industries you cover, and you’re privy to the top questions that industry confronts. Just take a look at which questions get the most response each week, and you have an instant list of the hot topics you might explore for stories.
11. List.ly
Do you like to create list posts? One of the best idea-joggers for that is List.ly, a site where people post lists. I first learned about this site when the List.ly was a conference sponsor at an event I went to, and it’s a fun place to browse around.
Visiting List.ly while writing this post, for instance, I discovered a list of the best songs to test headphones with, a list of 22 iPad apps for making classroom videos, and the top 10 best cities to visit to see fall color. Great fodder, no matter what sort of topic you’re looking to develop ideas on. You can search for topics you want, or click on the trending topic tags at the top.
12. Medium
Many freelance writers are experimenting with posting content on Medium for exposure — but don’t overlook its potential as an idea-generation site. You can search on topics you like, browse editors’ picks, top stories, or save authors you want to track.
13. Panda
This handy app can be a great way to browse for ideas while you’re waiting in line at the bank. Panda has a focus on all things tech and design, but ‘copywriting’ is also a category topic. It’s currently in beta, so watch for more developments here.
This can be a great place to quickly scan multiple streams of information. Featured channels I’d love to keep up on include Mashable, TechCrunch, the Verge, and hey — Medium and Quora are on here, too.
14. Pinterest
I’ll admit as a WORD person, I find Pinterest a little baffling. I mean, I’m happy to pin my own posts on a few relevant boards, but it’s not a place I spend a ton of time.
If you’re into it, though, it’s a great place to troll for ideas! First off, Pinterest serves you up pins based on your past interests.
Bored with that? You can click on a category and browse around to new categories, then click on some pins to see posts of interest:
15. Quora
Quora gets over 200 million visitors a month. Set up a profile, and you can enter topics of interest and see questions and answers about them.
P.S. Quora can also be a place to answer questions and build your own authority as an expert — so this can be a doubly useful site. More and more big names are popping up on there answering questions, including President Barack Obama.
16. Slideshare
More and more people are turning presentations they’ve done into Slideshare posts, making this site a gold mine of information, particularly on business topics. This site is owned by LinkedIn, FYI.
Doing a random search for ‘entrepreneurship’ recently, I found several different slideshares about the principles of ‘disciplined entrepreneurship’ — maybe a buzzworthy topic for an article I could develop. Win!
17. SmartBriefs
This has been another staple of my idea-finding process for many years. SmartBrief has more than 200 different newsletters on specific industries and topics. Sign up for the ones relevant to your writing career and get a nicely curated daily (or weekly) list of the hottest topics.
18. StumbleUpon
On StumbleUpon, you can set up a profile of your interests, hit the “Stumble” button, and see relevant popular content, from accounting to toys. For instance, on a recent browse, my stated interests in business and entrepreneurship brought up a cache of in-depth white papers on tech topics from one company. If you’re browsing dozens of popular sites in your topic, StumbleUpon could be your one-stop shop instead.
19. Subreddits
Like StumbleUpon, Reddit is a vast article-sharing site where roughly 1 million people a day post and upvote interesting content. If that sounds overwhelming, good news — there are smaller, topic-focused subreddits. Sign up to follow subreddits on topics you’re interested in, and you’ve tapped into a never-ending stream of information about what people are talking about and liking on that subject. Or, click on ‘Rising’ or ‘Controversial’ to just see what’s trending.
20. Twitter lists
I have to admit I’ve slacked off of using my Twitter lists, and I should probably get back to it. You can create your own lists on Twitter as useful places to save resources or contacts, and you can also subscribe to other peoples’ lists. They’ve made it harder to locate your lists these days — but it’s under the ‘More’ tab you see on the right here:
In fact, a quick browse of my lists prepping this post helped me discover a list of over 40 job-finding sites for writers that may provide fodder for upcoming roundup posts here on the blog. Ding!
Spinning new ideas from old
Once you’ve gathered interesting bits of news you like, how do you spin new story angles out of them? Here are a few of my favorite ways:
- What’s next? What will happen next with this trend or news event? Often, you can revisit the topic a month or a year later and write a new story.
- What’s missing? Articles and blog posts often raise new questions you could answer, with some additional interviews, or you can discover an aspect of a popular topic no one has explored. For instance, I recently loved this story’s fresh angle on Donald Trump.
- Change geographic focus — Find a local angle to a national story for a city magazine. Or do the opposite — see if a local story might also be nationally relevant. The Seattle Times does a great job of localizing national stories like the presidential election — watch your local daily to learn how it’s done.
- Mix ‘n’ match — Collect news about a topic that interests you, and look for connections between the different news stories. For instance, I saved news releases about new grilled-cheese sandwich restaurants opening up until I could create this story.
- New audience — Is there another type of publication where the readers would find an existing story interesting? Maybe you could re-slant it. In fact, this post you’re reading was inspired by a post I read for content marketers on how to keep up on SEO developments. I cut all the SEO-specific tools and kept the ones that I like for story-idea development. Presto! A new story for a new audience.
You can never have too many story ideas. I have a 40-page leftover note file of unused ideas from the Forbes blog I wrote for 3 years, for instance.
More ideas mean you have more choices, and you can keep prioritizing what the hottest ideas are on your list, and pitching them.
What online tools do you use to troll for story ideas? Share your faves in the comments.
