Ask the experts: How do I come up with content?

Introduction

Whenever you haven't sent an email in more than 45 days, Buttondown sends a friendly little reminder (just one — we're not monsters!) that ends with a call-to-action: if there's anything we can do to help alleviate your writer's block, reply and let us know!

A customer wrote in with a common question:

Hey Justin — I love Buttondown the tool but I must confess that I've come down with a serious case of writer's block, as you say. It was very easy to send out the first few editions of the newsletter but as I got further and further down the line it became increasingly difficult to come up with new ideas about what to write. How do you find topics?

There's one word that I lasered in on there — can you guess what it is?

It's new. New ideas about what to write.

I am sure there is a cute term for this fallacy, but I don't know what it is, so I'm going to call it the writer-audience context gap. (Okay, that's not a cute term at all.)

The writer-audience context gap

The writer-audience context gap refers to a simple fallacy:

1. You're intimately aware with everything you've ever written — your tweets, your blog posts, your newsletter, your pillar pages, all of it!
2. Only a miniscule subset of your audience has actually consumed everything you've ever written.
3. So what seems like it might be "recycled" material (taking a tweet from six months ago and expanding it into a longer-form email; re-running an old blog post with additional commentary; etc.) to you is actually brand new to the vast majority of your readers

Here's the big secret: most of the best content writing and marketing can sound like screaming into the void over and over, like a radio tower not quite sure of who's picking up on the broadcast.

Lean into this! Whenever you're feeling at wit's end about what to write, pore through your archives — on Buttondown and otherwise — to see what can be revisited or upcycled. The best writers have a handful of messages that their entire audience knows well, not dozens of messages that are lightly diffused across their audience.