One of the first bottlenecks you’ll probably come to when starting a YouTube channel is the fear of running out of content ideas and idea generation in general. A fear you’ll get to a point where you’ve got nothing new or interesting to offer to your audience.

“What if I run out of content ideas?”

And this fear is completely legit – I used to worry a lot about running out of ideas during my first year of doing YouTube properly. Especially as I knew the formula for YouTube success involved making decent videos and making them constantly (i.e. 1 video/week for 2+ years).

Even with an abundance of ideas, that output isn’t easy. But it definitely helps.

So figuring out a process for capturing and generating new video ideas is crucial to streamline your content creation process and give you the best opportunity to succeed.

Fortunately, over the past four years of my YouTube journey I’ve done exactly that and it’s what I’m going to share with you now. This process is what I call the ABC method of idea generation:

1. Ask Your Audience
   
2. Birdsong Technique
   
3. Coal Mining
   

Ask Your Audience

“You can’t read the label from inside the bottle”

This is a nice phrase that my writing coach likes to tell me. In short, when you’re too close to something, you can’t see it.

We don’t appreciate our own skill or competence because we’re a very critical observer of our own abilities. As a result, we think that we’re not particularly interesting and nobody is going to take us seriously. This leads to two negative thoughts that destroy our ability to think of ideas and regularly create new content:

1. Imposter Syndrome – when we think we’re not qualified to talk about something, we often hold back from putting ourselves out there.
2. Fear of failure – when we think our content is likely to perform poorly, we see little point in putting in the effort upfront. This therefore becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s only when we get out of the bottle we discover how much we have to offer.

The best way to do this is by listening to others. Other people have a more objective opinion of our abilities and are happy to tell us what we’re good at. And what they want to learn from us (like how you study or how you type fast etc.). This helps you to discover what sort of content you should be creating.

Asking your audience then is a fantastic way to get a bunch of new video ideas. The easiest way to do this is to post something on Twitter and Instagram saying something like “I want to make a video but need some ideas – what should I make a video about next?”. From this, you’ll receive loads of messages from fans literally telling you what they want to see. I now never worry about thinking of video ideas because the worst case scenario is I just ask my audience.

You might be thinking “well, that’s easy for you to say”, but even if you’re ‘billy no-mates’ and have no audience yet, it’s still possible to ask for ideas from your friends and family. This is a super easy way to generate a handful of video titles and get your channel flowing with ideas even before that first person subscribes.

Birdsong Technique

The Birdsong Technique comes from the idea that when you spend the time to research and learn about the chirping/warbling of different birds, you start to really appreciate the sounds they make. After a short time you’ll also begin recognising what bird is singing each specific song. Rather than it being some random-ass background sound that most of us hear but ignore.

So by understanding the basics of birdsong, it suddenly takes on a whole new colouring. And it’s basically the same with content lol.

When you’re a content consumer, you sort of passively enjoy the things that other people have created. You don’t think anything of it other than “this is kinda cool”. But as soon as you decide to be the creator, everything shifts. You start consuming content as a creator, and begin thinking “how can I use this content in my next video/article”.

So the birdsong technique is about recognising that all content is great for helping us to generate ideas.