No more blank staring at your screen hoping, wishing, and praying for magical ideas to woo and wow your audience. Hooray! I’m talking about ideas for finding and creating social media (or blog) content for your service-based business.

But before we get started I want to say something important because I sense a lot of overwhelm from bosses who work hard to create content for their businesses. Here’s some truth…

You don’t have to do it all. OK?

You don’t have to blog if you don’t want to blog.

You don’t have to do videos, if you don’t want to do videos.

You don’t have to be on every single social media platform under the sun.

You don’t have to post on social media every single day.

You don’t have to build a list if you don’t want to build a list.

BUT whatever you do and whatever platform that you are on, you want to do it well!

Don’t feel like you have to be on every single platform and post every single day.

I recommend that you choose up to social media platforms that you are to market your business because you don’t really have to be everywhere every day. Let’s make sure that you don’t overwhelm yourself trying to do every single thing in the universe.

Here’s how you can start creating Ideas for your service-based business:

#1 Start by Planning Content or Marketing Themes in Your Business

Give each quarter or month a theme. This can be based on your services, a specific subject matter, or product launch.

You really want to plan ideas and themes around what type of things you’re going to be promoting in your business or what type of items, products, or services you want to sell that during that month or quarter.

Here’s an example.

You could have one quarter or month where you focus on your social media management service and create content, promotions, and product launches around that.

So, for instance, if I were a bookkeeper and I wanted to sell a bookkeeping package for helping people to catch up their books or get ready for tax season then I would need to create content around promoting that service. Start talking about the tips, tricks, and ideas that connec to the subject matter associated with getting your business prepared to file your taxes. You could also talk about why it’s important to make sure your books are caught up or four tips for keeping up with your monthly bookkeeping.

If you’re a VA, you could be focusing on showcasing and trying to sell out your social media scheduling service. Once you chose your theme it will be a whole lot easier for you to focus your attention on one subject and the ideas, tools, tips, hacks, questions, points around that topic.

This theme is to help you focus on strategically creating your content around a specific thing you want to make money from.

#2 Create Ideas Based on Content Categories

Once you create a business marketing or content theme, start to create post ideas based on these categories

• Educate
• Engage
• Entertain
• Promote
• Inspire

Educate and provide value based on the subject matter surrounding your services.

Start providing value with tips, tricks, tutorials and hacks. What and why content is very helpful here as well. If you’re having trouble finding ideas for the educate arena, make a list of the tools and theories surrounding the services you provide and give a “DIY or How to” post or video.

Be sure to vocalize your expertise in providing solutions to your client’s pain points by providing value.

You can create a learning series with 4 social media posts that week focusing on a tip. I’m going to call this “image blogging.” You post about 4 ways to stay on top of your bookkeeping and release one tip on an image each day for four days until you get through them all.

Engage the audience with:

• Questions
• Fill in the blank posts
• Tag your favorite girl boss posts

Entertain your you audience and show your company culture with:

• Humorous videos + GIFs
• Boomerang videos (App)
• Tell a story

Promote Your Services with:

• Posts with deal offerings
• That you have X spots left for new clients
• That you are offering X services
• Share client testimonials
• Share examples of your work

Inspire your audience with:

• Quotes
• Causes
• Your business journey
• Your life behind the business

#3 Analyze What Your Top 3 Competitors or Industry Leaders are Doing

If you set up systems, you could analyze what the competitor or industry leader is doing for content and what they do to educate the value of having a good system in place. Let’s talk about 17 Hats, for example. You can actually go on the 17 Hats website and figure out what they’re posting about as pain points or ideas surrounding why clients need to have systems in place. You could use that research as inspiration for blog post ideas, email newsletter ideas, and social media posts ideas to help yourself along. Now I want to be very clear, do not under any circumstance, copy and paste another company’s content or ideas and publish them as your own. That is not what you want to do. You just want to use your research for topic inspiration to kind of ignite your mind to think, not to copy and paste. You can just use your competitors or industry leaders to kind of ignite your mind to work, but do not copy.

#4 Use Pinterest for Ideas Based on the Subject Matter of Your Services to Get Ideas

The next thing that you could do to possibly get content ideas is simply do a Pinterest search. Pinterest is the way to go when you’re just completely stuck. If all else fails and you can’t find anything, you can go to Pinterest and you can literally search for topics to ignite your inner creative muscles. Again, be very careful. Do not copy another person’s content. This is not for you to copy and paste. This is only for inspiration.

#5 Ask Your Target Audience in Facebook Groups

Another tip of how to find content is to ask your audience. How easy is that? Ask your audience your pain points. Go into your favorite Facebook groups and actually post their title and say, what is your number one struggle when it comes to blank? All right, so for instance, if your ideal client was business coaches and you do bookkeeping and accounting work, your question could be “business coaches, what is your number one struggle when it comes to managing your accounting or your bookkeeping?” and they let them give you answers about their struggles.

Every comment that you get back is a potential pain point and content idea for you go give a solution to.

#6 Use an Editorial Calendar!

Do yourself a favor and use an editorial calendar. I actually use ClickUp for this. I use this project manager to house all of my ideas. I even have the app on my phone so that I can just put ideas into my little content bank anytime something hits me no matter where I am.  I can literally drag and drop them onto a calendar view to plan out content.

Plan your content on this calendar to stay on task. The project management tool itself can give you reminders when things are due so you can check it off. You can also do this in a paper planner if that feels more natural to you! The thing I love most about doing this electronically is being able to attach your captions, images, videos, and GIFs to the planned post on your calendar. If you don’t have a project management tool or a planner, don’t fret.

I’ve created a fillable 12-Month Content Planning Worksheet for you. That’s right girlfriend! Today’s the day that you can finally say girl bye to glazing over looking at the computer screen wondering how in the heck you’re supposed to attract clients on social media with absolutely ZERO content ideas? Want it?

Download your very own copy of the worksheets below in my resource library! You’ve got a sheet to plan content themes for the year as well as a reusable monthly content planning sheet to use again and again.