“I don’t know what to post” is the number one thing Erika hears — from clients, from strangers, from women who know they want to show up but freeze at the blank screen. In this episode, she breaks down exactly how to come up with content ideas at every stage, so you never have to stare at an empty screen again.

Whether you’re brand new and haven’t posted a thing, you’re posting but can’t stay consistent, or you already have an offer and want your content to actually lead somewhere — there’s a path for you here.

In this episode:

• Why you don’t need to be an expert to create content people find valuable
• The “document, don’t create” approach for when you’re just starting out
• Creating content for your younger self — and why other people find it so valuable
• How to use your feed as evidence of what’s already working (and recreate it the right way)
• Using your DMs, comments, and stories to find endless ideas
• How to build content pillars from the life you’re already living
• Selfish vs. selfless content — the small reframe that makes your life “interesting”
• How to work backwards from your offer using the bullseye method
• 3 plug-and-play hooks you can post today, tomorrow, or next week

If you’re tired of overcomplicating this, this episode is your permission slip to keep it simple and just start.

Ready to build a profitable, purposeful personal brand?

One spot just opened up inside Courage Driven Latina. You’ll get immediate access to the full Visibility Challenge — 10 days of prompts, formats, and templates — plus trainings on content formats and creating selfless content that reaches more than your mom and user59346.

Join here: www.couragedrivenlatina.com — or send Erika a DM on Instagram.

Free training: How to Create Content That Gets Seen — the 3 mistakes to avoid and how to fix them → TRAINING

Transcript:

Hello, hello, welcome back to Chingona Revolution Podcast. This is your host, Erika Cruz, and today I wanted to film a podcast episode on how to come up with content ideas. This is by far the number one question I get from clients, I get from strangers. I don’t know what to post. That is something I hear all the time, and I get it, it can be so overwhelming because there’s so many possibilities.

For what you can post, right? So let me take you through a set of ideas that you could run yourself through and some exercises that you can run yourself through. Because depending on where you are in your content creator journey, my response does change. And when you are just starting out, it’s going to be very different than when you already have an offer that you are selling. And for me, I it’s It’s rare for me to run out of content ideas.

I might I actually have the opposite problem where I have all these ideas and I’m just like, no, I just need to execute now. I need to sit down and actually film them or I’ll record and I just don’t get to the editing piece. So if you’re in that place where you’re like, I just don’t have any ideas, trust me, on the other side of too many ideas, you will come across other obstacles. And that is all part of the content creator journey. So let’s say that you are just starting out.

You are new to content creation, maybe you’ve only posted some content before that’s around your friends and family and trips, and you haven’t really created content as a form of building a personal brand or as a form of marketing just yet. You might be saying to yourself, I am not an expert, I don’t know what I bring to the table, what in the world am I going to talk about? I’ve heard it all before. Or I don’t know when I’m going to sell yet. How do I know exactly what I need to post?

And when you are just starting out, all you need to do is document. All you need to do is document your journey. If you are in the process of starting a new school, document the journey of that. If you are learning a new hobby or a new skill, document the journey of that. You do not have to be an expert in something in order to create valuable content for people.

And Content needs to kind of exist with what your daily life is. I don’t go out of my way to capture content doing a 17-mile hike because I don’t do 17-mile hikes, but I do do two-mile little walks with my dog and I do capture content while I’m there. I sit at my computer a lot and I capture content while I’m there. I go to kickboxing, so I’ll capture some clips there. So whatever you’re already doing in your life, capture some content from that.

And if you feel like you don’t know exactly what your direction is yet, if you create content for your younger self, other people will find it so, so valuable. So imagine that you went back in time and you met your younger self from three years ago, four years ago, five years ago. There would be so much helpful stuff you could tell your younger self that that version of you would find immensely valuable. So let’s say That you have navigated a career pivot and you learned that keeping your connections open and going to networking events would have been really helpful for you. And that’s what eventually helped you get a job.

That is something that you could create content on. three things I wish I knew before getting laid off in the tech industry, for example. Or three things I would say to my younger self as she is navigating a breakup, or I’m 35. Here are 10 things I needed to hear at 22. All of those are really valuable pieces of content that don’t require you to be an expert, but it allows you to kind of share your journey and what it is that you’ve learned and what you have learned through your lived experience. Another way of finding, and honestly, that in itself could be a whole podcast episode.

We can literally just talk about ideas, right? Where you are creating content that serves your younger self. Or e a piece of content could be like, I’m gonna go try a new workout class, come join me. You could even do a series, 10 days of implementing a new morning routine. Come with me.

And then you take us along the journey and you show us the wins you had, the struggles you had. Because with the rise of AI, people do not want perfection. People want to see somebody that’s relatable. And that is the advantage that you have. You do not need to be an expert.

And if you are an expert, amazing. Show up as an expert. But if you’re not an expert, that is okay. It’s not necessary whatsoever. Another way of identifying what kind of content you will enjoy creating is by the content you enjoy consuming.

So take a look at your feed. What kind of content do you already enjoy? The biggest thing about content that people overcomplicate is they feel like they need to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel when the reality is that our algorithm is giving us evidence of what’s working already. If you see a piece of content that you really like, recreate it. And if you do it exactly the same as the other creator, give them credit for it.

I do this all the time where I really like a piece of content. I make my own version of it, and then I give somebody and then I give somebody else and then I give the original creator credit for the idea. Or if you see a piece of content you really like, and maybe it’s from a, I don’t know, maybe it’s like fashion, but you want to talk about parenthood. Maybe you just change up the message, but you use the same song, you use the same style of hook, but you make it your own. I think the biggest struggle is just opening a blank screen, having no guidance whatsoever.

So this is where I heavily rely on the edits app, which is the Instagram editing platform, and I use templates. All the time, whenever I’m traveling, or whenever I don’t have a lot of time to create something, or if I’ve already created something in the past, I will definitely repurpose it. I have way more ideas as well. inside of my program, Courage Driven Latina, we have something called the visibility challenge, and a lot of people who join are just now getting started with creating content. So with the visibility challenge, I give them prompts and I give them the formats to so whether it’s a carousel or a reel or what it is that they have to do in order to create the piece of content and I even give them templates and they get 10 days of templates. So you never really have to think about what to post.

All you have to do is customize the template for your own message. And that has been so helpful for my clients because some clients join and they’ve never really posted before, but they know they want to. And then I’ve got other clients who are posting but they struggle with being consistent. So if that is you, we’re going to talk about you. If you already post but you’re having a hard time being consistent, some great places to look for content ideas is to look at what have people DM’d you about?

What do people comment about? Responding to a comment, you could respond to a comment with a real ones. Instagram and on TikTok, and that is a great way of engaging with your community. It’s a great way of giving answers that your community is asking about, but then also sharing it with everybody else. You could even do a series.

So if let’s say that somebody seems to be really interested in the salad that you made for dinner one night, well, what if you did a week of easy salads and that becomes your series? Or maybe it is Career tips that we should have been taught in school but weren’t. So I’m teaching them to you, or something like that, some career tip series. Because the benefit that you have as somebody who’s already created content is that you have data, you have evidence around what has worked well, what you’ve enjoyed creating, what other people have enjoyed consuming. And if you want to test things out, a great place to test things out is stories because you don’t have to commit to a full reel or a carousel.

You can just test out different ideas for content. on your stories. Sometimes when I don’t know what podcast to record, I will come up with three different options, put it on my Instagram stories, and I let you all pick because you’re going to be the ones listening, right? So I’m like, all right, what do they want to hear? Here are three things I would enjoy talking. If you are also already creating content and you are having a hard time with staying consistent, do not be afraid to reuse old footage.

I just did a training earlier today with my clients where I showed them how I repurpose footage. It’s literally the exact same clip, and I will put a different hook and a different song on the video, and that becomes a whole new piece of content. And I’ve done that so many times, and I’ll do it just a few weeks apart. I know that as I’m verbally saying these different ideas, unless you’ve created content, this may not make complete sense to you. So I do invite you to check out my free training how to create content that gets seen and the three mistakes to avoid and then how to fix them.

And this is also that you can get more people than just your mom and the random follower who always likes things to see your content. So I do have a visual training where you can get a visual that would make this make a lot more sense. So if you’re feeling lost right now, check that out. I’ll put the link down below in the show notes. If you are having a hard time being consistent, I think we’ve all heard of content pillars at this point.

You can create your own version of content pillars. And the way I would suggest creating your content pillars is what is going on in your life right now? Are you currently in the process of learning how to film and create content better? Are you in your yoga phase? Are you in your mommy phase?

What’s how what’s happening here in your current life? I guess you don’t go through a mommy phase, right? But like toddler mommy phase. Let’s see, like a teen mommy phase, and you could create content about those different buckets, and you can always come back to those. So the buckets that I tend to create content on are my business, content creation, fitness, and traveling.

Because those are things I’m doing all the time. And I have footage about these. I it makes sense because I have an offer, right? That that helps people create content so that they could build a business. So that makes total sense for me.

If you are just starting out, just pick things you’re already doing in your life. You don’t have to go start something new. If you are already going to go play soccer every week, let that be part of your series. If you are already learning pottery, let that be I’m sorry, series, not series, let that be part of your pillars. If you’re learning pottery, that could be a pillar for you as well.

So capture what you’re already doing. I know you might think your life is not that interesting, but it’s only quote unquote not interesting because you’re living it every single day. But for the outside person, if you can turn your content into something that is valuable for somebody else, that is the key. I talk about this in the training as well. It’s the difference between selfish content and selfless content.

And I’ll give you an example. Instead of posting a piece of content that’s like My here’s my recent trip to Cancun. Maybe you say it something along the lines of here’s everything we did in Cancun that was worth the money and what we think you should skip. That is so valuable, right? It’s still your trip, but the way you framed it was valuable for somebody else.

Your life is interesting enough if you can give value to other people and you definitely can. Now let’s say that you are already showing up and you are consistent enough and you have an offer. How do you create content when you have an offer? I like to work backwards from my offer. So if my offer is my program CDL, Courage Driven Latina, which helps women build a profitable and purposeful personal brand in 90 days.

And that is a longer program, I’m like, okay. How can I create a piece of content that makes sense to get people to my program? And you want to work backwards from the program. So if mine is personal branding, well, maybe I might literally this podcast episode’s a great example, right? How to learn how to.

Literally, this podcast is a perfect example, right? How to come up with content ideas because I know that this is something that people struggle with. They tell me in my program, they tell me on sales calls. I can’t believe I actually haven’t done a piece of content like this as well. And I’m actually gonna give you some hooks and some pieces of content that you can do at the end.

So make sure that you stay for that. I should have said this at the beginning, but that’s okay. Here we are. So this is an example of something that can lead to my offer. It wouldn’t make sense for me to create a podcast episode about the difference in nutrition between iceberg lettuce and kale when what I’m actually my business is about is something else.

So if you know you want a business or you already have a business, I would work backwards from that. And I almost think about this like a bullseye. So if you’re, you know how there’s like the target bullseye. Imagine that your offer is the little centerpiece and then the content you’re creating is just a little bit more general. So while this is a pretty specific piece of of content, it’s closer to the bullseye.

Maybe a more general piece of content would be something if I created a piece of content that was like I want to show up, but I’m afraid people will think I’m cringe. And then I’m discussing overcoming cringe. Or a video I did where it said it’s all cringe. And then it’s kind of me early on in my content creation career until it works. And then it’s what I’m doing now and the success that I’ve had now.

And that is a great piece of content that people will find very entertaining. People will relate to. They’ll find it relatable and it still somewhat connects to my offer, which is about content creation. But now if I was going to go further outside on that little target. But if I was going to go further out on that little target bullseye, I might create a piece of content that’s something geared towards ambitious women because I know my ideal client is very ambitious.

And maybe they don’t know they want to build a brand yet. Or maybe they don’t want to build a brand. But I do know that my ideal client is ambitious. I also know a lot of my ideal clients are Latina. So I will make cultural content about being Latina and about being ambitious.

And that brings a lot of people into my page. And not everybody’s a great fit for my offer, but I am intentional even when I create more general content to come towards my offer. If you don’t have an offer yet and you don’t know what your offer is going to be, do not worry about this. Literally post the piece of content that your younger self needed. That is your guidance, okay?

Because it’s very easy to overcomplicate this and I don’t want you to overcomplicate it whatsoever, but I am gonna give you like three pieces of content and But I am going to give you three pieces of content that you can post today, tomorrow, next week. Ha ha. I think it might be helpful if I also give you some additional tips with how you can go from idea to execution because it’s one thing to have a content idea, but if you have the message in your mind, you also need to decide what kind of format it’s going to be. Is it going to be a carousel? Is it going to be a video?

And if it’s a video, are you talking to the camera? Or is it going to be music and you’re just gonna have a text hook on the screen, for example? And I talk about this in my training. So if you need to take a look at the different content examples, take a look at the free training down below. So if you need to see the format examples, take a look at the training down below.

If you know you want to talk to the camera, it is vital for you to have your script fully written out. I learned this the hard way because I used to record these videos and it was just seven, eight, ten minutes of me talking and rambling. And the editing took so long. Now I write down my script and I literally just read the line. And that has saved me so, so much time.

And if you are just starting out, you probably don’t want to start talking to camera just yet because there’s a lot of factors that can go wrong, right? Lighting can be off, your sound can be off. So I do think it’s easier to start with a piece of footage you might already have, which then means you also need to capture some footage. So people think, yeah, I’m just gonna start creating content right now. And it can be very quick, but know that you need to have footage in your phone.

You need to have a song choice in mind. So this is why it’s a lot easier to recreate something that you’ve seen online. It’s almost like you’re leveraging it as a template. That is how I would start if you are just just starting out. So as promised, let me give you some hooks that you can use for your content.

And I am taking a couple of these just from and I’m taking a couple of these from the visibility challenge that I mentioned my clients get access to. Honestly, this has helped people go from not showing up to showing up. One of my clients got reached out by Forbes. Sorry, let me say that again. One of my clients got reached out by Forbes to do an article.

How exciting is that? Another client got a lot of inquiries for her offer. Another client grew literally hundreds of followers just from two posts from this challenge. So let me share some of these ideas for you. And I would suggest you can make them carousels or you could make them a reel or a TikTok with some music and some text on top, and then footage of you doing something.

So the first prompt I’m giving you is I am a specific age or identity. Here are five things you’ll regret not starting in your time period. So my example is I’m 35. Here are five high here’s my example. I’m 35 and here are five hobbies you’ll regret not starting in your 20s.

Or it might be I’m a mom who almost lost herself. Here are five things I tell every new mom before the before the sleep deprivation hits. The second hook is identity to identity. They lied to us. And then the thing that you wish somebody told you.

So my example is girl to girl, they lied to us. Your 30s is where it’s at. You’re wiser, richer, and you don’t care about others’ opinions. But maybe if you are a finance person or you know you want to c talk, talk about finance, yours might be first gen to first gen. They lied to us.

Saving money isn’t going to build wealth. It’s going to sit in account losing value while everyone else’s money is working for them. And a really simple one that you can use is I don’t know who needs to hear this, but, and then say a statement that you wish somebody would have told you, or a hard truth, or an unpopular opinion. That is a proven hook that really does pique curiosity. So those are your three content ideas that you can run with.

If you create these, please tag me because I would love to see them. And if you want to join us inside of my program Courage Driven Latina, I have one person who has graduated, meaning a what meaning one spot has opened up. And if you want to claim that spot, you can go to courage drivenlatina.com or you can send me a DM on Instagram. You will get immediate access to the visibility challenge, the full visibility challenge. And there’s videos for each day as well as a bunch of examples.

To help you. And then I also have trainings on the different content formats and how to create selfless content that really does get the attention of more people than your mom and user 59346. Okay, y’all. Thank you so much for spending some time with me. I will see you in to I will see you in next week’s episode.

Have a great week and see you then.