What Do You Do If You Start Running Out Of Ideas For Your Online Content?

If you produce online content or anything creative and you do it on a prolific basis, you would undoubtedly come across days when you find yourself lacking ideas on what to produce. This especially happens if you are producing online content for a very niche subject.

For example, if you produce blogs or YouTube videos about ant farming you might find it one day that you’ve virtually exhausted all the topics there are about ant farming and you’ve got nothing to write anymore.

This problem could have been averted if you’ve picked a more broader subject matter. For instance, you could have picked insect farming as against ant farming. This way, you’ll easily get an almost inexhaustible supply of topics about insect farming.

But what do you do if you’ve trapped yourself in a corner by choosing a very narrow subject matter in the first place? Thankfully, there is a solution for this. You can use the work of others as reference and improve upon them. But is what I’m suggesting copyright violation?

The US Copyright Office defines copyright as: “Copyright is a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression.”

“In copyright law, there are a lot of different types of works, including paintings, photographs, illustrations, musical compositions, sound recordings, computer programs, books, poems, blog posts, movies, architectural works, plays, and so much more!”

A more detailed explanation of copyright is in the website of the US Copyright Office titled: What is Copyright? It is highly suggested that you study copyright laws first before you start referencing the work of others in your own content.

But as a guideline, you should only be referencing the work of others and not copying them. Also, if you reference the work of others then you have to give them proper acknowledgement for their part in your work.

And to be safe, you should really ask for the approval of the original creator of the work you’re referencing although admittedly this could be very tedious. Not doing so can however land you into legal trouble.

One of the first thing you could do to reference the work of others to create your own original work is to either lengthen or shorten the work you’re referencing. But don’t be fooled, it’s not just a matter of adding or subtracting some pieces of the work of others.

Your work must be either longer or shorter for a reason. For example, you find a website detailing the top ten most famous cars in the world and decide to reference it in your own top ten list of most famous cars in the world, what do you do?

Then you only reference the top ten car list from your website reference and either insert totally new cars that were not in the list or you could change the order in which the cars are rated while giving your own explanation as to why you rated them so.

For shortening a reference work, we can look at the ebook industry. Nowadays a lot of ebook content platforms have been banning the so-called "Book Summary" online content because many of the original authors of these books deem them as copyright violation.

But it all depends on the wordings of the book summaries. If the book summarizer mentions in their own words the summary of a chapter in the book and gives it their own shorter explanation, then it passes off as an original work. It all depends on the wordings.

This especially applies to informational and educational content and is an extension of the previous paragraph. Let’s say you wanted to reference a video whose subject matter is all about the deadliest volcanoes in the world.

The reference video might state the name of the volcanoes, where they are located, when they erupted and how much damage they inflicted on humanity. You can improve upon this work by actually, citing active volcanoes that are due to erupt one day.

You can also add how long it took humanity to recover from these volcanoes and when they are probably set to explode again. You can mention the blast area of the volcano and the actual crater size of the volcanoes.

You can mention statistical data on not only the active volcanoes but also of the dormant ones. You can mention for example how much is the average cost of damage a volcano cost on a populace and so on.

More than likely, as you give out more statistics on your subject matter, the more you would find specific topics on it to create your own work. In fact, there are online websites that only compile yearly statistics as a content and they are popular because people find them useful.

If you’ve been following the Johny Depp vs. Amber Heard Saga, then you would already know how polarized the public opinion is about the two. There are those that claim that Johny Depp is the victim while others say its Amber Heard.

This is a perfect example of how many topic angles a certain subject could have. The angle from Johny Depp is one example while the angle from Amber Heard is another. We could also add other angles to this court story.

For example, we could add the angle: ”People who support Johny Depp and why” or ”People who support Amber Heard and why”. We can also add: “Why do you think the jury sided with Johny Depp?”

As you can see, from one subject matter we were able to create a few more topics related to the subject matter. We could also add: “Has the law been fair to Amber Heard?” Or “Has the media been fair to Amber Heard?”. Additionally we can add: “Where is Amber Heard Now?”

As you can see, the Johny Deep vs. Amber Heard court case is like an ever growing rabbit hole. All that you need to do is to take a step back and view your subject matter from a much wider angle to see all the correlated topics in it.

Not all subject matters are the same for each country. For example, if you were talking about art, the art style and culture from one country is different from another. So is politics, entertainment, society and so on.

If you find that you’ve exhausted your subject matter for your particular country, you might want to consider exploring subjects that belong to another country. For example, the country of Japan is a famous tourist destination and a lot of people want to visit it one day.

In fact the entertainment industry is known for using this strategy in their movies, books, advertising and so on. For example, the Fast and the Furious franchise has been known for showing elaborate stories and car chases in different countries around the world.

You can also make comparisons. For example, if you’re talking about cars and you’ve exhausted all your topics, you might make a comparison video about cars vs trucks or cars vs motorcycles.

You might want to elaborate why a car owner character is different from a motorcycle owner character. You may for example want to compare how a woman feels about cars as against motorcycles. As you can see, there are plenty of comparison related topics you can create.

Whatever you do, don’t just stop creating regular content if you find yourself running out of subjects to create. This is because if you’ve garnered some regular following already, your regular customers would expect regular output as well from you.

I actually did a test just to see if my viewership would go down if I stop producing content for even a short while. I found out that my hunch was right. There are customers of mine who require me to produce output on a regular basis.

When I stopped producing content, my viewership levels for a time remained stable but quickly declined. This just means that there are already regular readers of my blog. So, my advise to anyone wanting to produce online content is to produce a regular content output.

If you are producing content every weekends only, then produce content every weekend because this is what your regular customers/viewers would be accustomed of you.

If you are running out of ideas for your chosen subject matter, take reference or be inspired by the work of others to create your own original work. You must however be mindful of copyright laws lest you run into legal problems.

If you’ve established even a small customer/viewership base, you need to produce regular content based on a schedule. This is because your regular customers/viewers would expect regular content from you based off your regularly scheduled output timeframe.