7 Completely Free Tools for Endless LinkedIn Content Ideas + Inspiration
Mar 16, 2023
Great LinkedIn content starts with great topics – topics that are relevant, address your audience’s pain points and desires, and provide quick hits of value.
Developing a system of reliable, stellar topic inputs help guarantee that your posting outputs will grow your brand and followers.
Unfortunately, most people shoot from the hip when it comes to posting content. They wait for light bulb moments or flashes of inspiration to post. Not only is this unreliable, it derails the number one building block of a personal brand– consistency.
The good news? Setting a weekly time block to check these 7 content idea generators is a no-fail way to ensure you are a high-powered content conveyor belt.
AI Generators
You can’t screw LinkedIn’s newsfeed these days without some creator proselytizing the use of ChatGPT to supercharge content. And for good reason. It works…when you use it right.
Here’s the deal with artificial intelligence, it’s a great brainstorming buddy, but for me, that’s basically where it stops. I use Jasper.ai, which is a writing tool based on Generative Pre-trained Transformer language (GPT) models to help me generate content ideas, then, I copy them to a document and flesh them out into fully-baked posts.
Below is an example of what Jasper and I did together. I wanted to write a “witty” Tweet about why more people should build their personal brand. Of the 18 ideas it kicked out, I thought 17 were garbage, and 1 was good. So I saved that post to build around and tossed the others. The good news? This took me all of 2 minutes to do.
Facebook Groups
The only reason I still spend time on Facebook as a marketer is to peruse through Facebook groups. I hop into any and all that I find my target demographic belongs to. The level of vulnerability you can find in these groups around what your audience is struggling with is baffling. It’s like overhearing intimate conversations between your ideal customers, and this is great because when you know what they’re struggling with, you will come up with ideas to help them.
Take a look at the below. I was intrigued when I saw someone asking for virtual assistant recommendations to help with social media and copywriting. It inspired me to create an article called, “How to turn your Virtual Assistant into a Personal Branding Machine.”
There’s gold in them there groups. Go find it.
Reddit Threads
Reddit is the ultimate Q/A and digital bulletin board of 2023. While you can go down some pretty dark rabbit holes on the platform or lose yourself in TV threads (I’m no stranger to Severance and Yellowjacket’s many discussion boards), you can customize your home page to include topics you’re interested in.
For example, I’m in the “Entrepreneur” Reddit community, and I saw the post below about create-your-own website platforms that had a decent amount of “upvotes” (meaning it’s popular with my target demographic of entrepreneurs).
Since I’m in marketing, I could create a scrollable slide status for LinkedIn, listing out my favorite website builders.
Google Trends
Google trends is a free tool where you can explore trending topics based on search volume. It’s a great way to find relevant stories, then provide your opinion on the matter via a LinkedIn post. If it’s trending on Google, it will probably start trending on your newsfeed and, bonus, with LinkedIn editorial’s team.
For example, yesterday, I saw that ChatGPT4 was trending.
If I wanted to, I could publish a post called, “The new ChatGPT is here. Here’s how it can help your content.”
Since I know a lot of people are searching for this topic, it’s a great opportunity to siphon traffic to my LinkedIn article page or my own website.
Google News
Google News is a tab under Google search that shows you new stories published around a specific search query. So, Google trends can show you what’s trending in the news, and Google News will show you what’s written about it.
In the example below, I searched “personal branding.” This isn’t a trending topic by any means, but it does give me a good amount of articles that can provide me statistics to reference or topics to serve as inspiration for my own pieces on the platform.
Podcasts and Audiobooks
Audio learning is every multi-tasking creator’s best friend. I love listening to podcasts about entrepreneurship and consulting because those are my target audience members. When I listen to these podcasts and hear stories and learn lessons from interviewees, I’m often reminded of a similar journey I went through or a long-forgotten learning lesson resurfaces.
I then quickly ask my favorite digital assistant, Siri, to make a note of this idea on my phone, and then when I’m in front of my computer for writing time, I’ll formulate a post around it.
Reading
It’s not just the ideas you get from books that can make for amazing content; it’s your implementation of the ideas from those books that make for amazing content. For example, when I read “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, I was inspired to restart my journaling habit. Then I kept track of how I doubled down on my journaling and shared my “journaling journey” as a post. It’s performed extremely well.
Remember, books can provide great tips and strategies, but so often, our audience is hungry for case studies of people similar to themselves actually implementing them. So document and share what you learn!
The Recap:
- Most people don’t have a reliable system to generate endless content ideas.
- Calendaring a 30-minute block in your weekly schedule to tap into these 7 tools will provide you with endless content ideas.
- Store these in a note capture tool of your choice, and keep adding to the list.
Looking for a community of high-income experts growing their personal brand online?
Join our Brand Inner Circle Community. For $250/month, you’ll get access to weekly 90-minute writing labs led by yours truly, monthly Q&A, networking, and content prompts galore.
 |