Plan Your Topics

In this module, you will learn how to plan the content topics that showcase your expertise and directly address your niche’s primary pain points and aspirations.

• Brainstorm Topics

• Capture Future Topics

• Create an Editorial Calendar

Brainstorm Topics

When brainstorming topics, consider these tips: 

• Speak to primary pain points and financial concerns. The best topics are the ones that directly address your persona’s primary pain points and financial concerns—the ones that begin to answer the questions that are top of mind and keep them up at night. 

• Spark curiosity or relieve fear. Focus on things that your niche is interested in or worried about.

• Address top-of-mind topics. Consider topics that would be top of mind for your persona within 90 days of hiring you. Consider which topics your persona will be most interested in at the point they are ready to take action.

Example: Your niche is divorce financial planning. The issue they are considering 90 days before hiring you is, “Why Getting Half Isn’t Always Financially Fair in a Divorce.”

Example: Your niche is people who have received inheritances. The issue top of mind for them is, “Common Tax Mistakes People Make with Their Inheritance.” 

• Answer the “what,” not the “how.” Make sure that the topics are about what they should do, but not how they should do it. The idea behind this concept is that once they know what they need to do, you provide them with the solutions.

• Be specific. Choose topics that are specific to your niche. Whatever topic you choose, you want to make sure that the language and examples given resonate with them. You want them to understand in the title that this content is specifically for them. Whatever you do, do not include generic topics such as economic outlooks. Every topic must be specific to your niche.

Example: Your niche is business owners. Tailor the topic of retirement planning to be “3 Mistakes Business Owners Make When Selling Their Business That Can Damage Their Retirement Plans.”

Your next step is to brainstorm, categorize, and prioritize your topics using the Content Brainstorming Worksheet, a virtual Post-it note board. Use the different columns to categorize your ideas. We have provided you with three categories to start with—Primary Financial Concerns, Pain Points and Worries, and Goals and Aspirations—but feel free to edit these as you see fit. Once you have written down your ideas, you should reorganize the sticky notes on each column in order of importance so that the most important topics are on top and the least important ones are at the bottom. 

Capture Future Topics

Using the brainstorming process above is based on your best guess from either your research or your observations from working with the niche. As you start to meet with more prospects and work with more clients in your niche, identifying topics will be easier. The key is to capture topics throughout your day-to-day interactions with clients and prospects so that you are never struggling to come up with content ideas. You’ll also be able to use this information to reflect the same language your niche uses in your content.

In the book The Business of Expertise, author David C. Baker talks about how, when you start narrowing your positioning or what we call messaging, you attract a narrower set of clients, which we call your niche. As you work with niche clients, you will notice that they start to present similar scenarios and that patterns start to emerge. You will want to capture these patterns and then create content that provides insights into these patterns. The more content you write, the more you narrow your positioning that you work only with a specific set of niche clients. And the process repeats itself.

Example: You work with divorcing women. After working with five of them, you notice that for three of them, keeping the family home was important because they didn’t want to disrupt the kids. They were facing the same similar scenario, and the pattern emerged of divorcing women wanting to keep their house.

This is a topic you would want to write down and then communicate your insights on this topic in a blog or video. The topic could be “Should You Keep, Sell, or Let Your Ex-Husband Have the House in a Divorce?” You would point out the pros and cons of each option based on your experience. You could include scenarios that are similar to the types of clients you are working with. For example, you could talk about a woman in her mid-50s with two high school-aged kids living in a $2 million house who wants to keep her home until the kids go off to college. By writing on this topic with this example, you are positioning yourself as working with affluent divorcing women. You will start to attract more affluent divorcing women who are similar to this scenario, and then new scenarios and patterns will emerge. The cycle repeats itself.

What to Track

How do you capture similar scenarios and start to identify patterns? You want to track the following:

• Triggering events. A triggering event is an event that was happening in the client’s life that made them reach out to you in the first place. For a woman getting a divorce, the triggering event could be finding out a spouse is cheating, talking to a divorce attorney who referred her, filing for a divorce, or going through a divorce and having the gut feeling she isn’t getting a fair settlement. In this example, there are four different triggering events for the same niche. 

• Primary financial concern or frustration. In your meeting, what do they say their primary financial concern or frustration is? For a divorcing woman, her primary concern may be “Will I have enough money to maintain the lifestyle for myself and the kids that we are all used to?”

• Ultimate goal or aspiration. Again, in your meeting, what do they say their ultimate goal or aspiration is? For our example client, she may say her goal is to rebuild a life on her terms where she feels happy, confident, and secure.

• Services or solutions. What services or solutions does the niche client mention that they think they need? You’ll want to track this even if it is not a service you offer. For example, the divorcing woman may say she needs to refinance the house in her name. You would note that she may need mortgage services, and you could write content on refinancing a home as part of a divorce settlement. 

• Specific words and phrases. What are the specific words and phrases they use to describe their situation? It will be important to reflect this wording back to your niche in your content.

For example, the divorcing woman may not say she needs to refinance her home. She may say she needs to lower her mortgage payment or get her husband’s name off the mortgage. These would be key phrases to write down that you could use as a topic. The topic, in this case, would be “How to Lower Your Monthly Mortgage Payments So You Can Afford to Keep Your House in a Divorce.” One mistake I often see advisors make is that they use too much industry jargon instead of using the language their niche clients would use.

There are two ways you can track this information. The first is to create custom fields for each of the areas to track in your CRM. The second way is to use our Pattern Matching worksheet. Each time you meet with a prospect or client, write down this information. This is going to take discipline to do, but it will make brainstorming ideas and creating better content easier. 

The next time you plan your content calendar for the quarter, run a report in your CRM or reference your spreadsheet to see all the scenarios your clients and prospects are facing.

Create an Editorial Calendar

We recommend you create two blogs or videos each month. It is easy to procrastinate creating content, so to avoid this, establish a content plan for each quarter and stick to it.

Pull six topics from your Content Brainstorming Worksheet that you will address this quarter. When you have your topic, type it into Google to see how other people are addressing the topic. For example, let’s say you work with sales executives and your topic is budgeting for a volatile income. When you put the topic in a Google search, some of the most popular results are:

• How to Budget with an Irregular Income

• How to Manage Income Volatility

• Wild Income Swings Can Play Havoc with Your Finances

While you don’t want to copy the titles exactly, you can see how popular articles title their pieces. Use the Google search results to inspire your own title. Also, think about using a title that is a question. In the last example, two of the titles began with “how to.” The reason to consider titling your content as a question is that it’s often how people are searching on Google or YouTube, or even asking their smart speaker for information.