How to Turn Your Comments Section Into a Content-Backlog

Building an online brand is tethered to creating great content.

The trouble is it can be tricky to come up with ideas, day in, and day out for content, especially when you have 101 other things to be doing. I get it, I've been there. I live there.

But you don’t have to be scratching your head for hours trying to come up with new ideas, in fact, there is one source of inspiration that is a treasure-trove of ideas if you know how to use it.

That’s why today I want to tell you the step-by-step process I use to write content consistently by leveraging my comments section.

Step 1: Review your comments section

If you write anything on the internet, one of the scariest things is that anyone can comment on your work. Now as scary as that is, 99% of people will be helpful, positive, and friendly.

And it gets better... you can reverse engineer your comments section to build a backlog. You probably just don’t know how yet.

You see comments are signals. They are evidence of what is working and what isn’t. If you can get smart about your comments section you can use your comments to drive your next iteration of content.

The first step is reviewing.

Read through all your comments section and look for key signals, here are a few things I look out for:

• Strong emotion
• Words that indicate something has resonated
• Gaps in knowledge or understanding that I can use

Make a list of the comments that stood out to you in a document (you can refer back to this list when you are low on ideas).

Step 2: Understand what the obstacle is

One of the biggest mistakes part-time creators make is not digging deep enough.

Once I’ve got a list of comments, I ask myself some broad questions that help me build new ideas for my writing (here you are looking for just one idea that you can explore further).

Here are some of the questions I ask myself:

• What seems to resonate most with readers?
• What ideas seemed to strike a chord with readers?
• What caused confusion that might need explaining better?

Let’s take an example, below is a comment I got from a reader that stood out to me:

It touches on a wider point: writing is about resonating, to resonate you must connect but the things that connect us can be scary, like vulnerabilities but that braveness is where the magic lies.

So we can take this a step further, here's how...

Step 3: Write a problem statement that fits

I work in user-centered design (a fancy word for researching what people want and making it happen).

Your readers will literally (literally) tell you what they want if you pay attention.

But there’s a knack to it.

When you collect the reader’s comments, you can see what resonates and why, here we can see that vulnerability is a point of interest. It’s obvious that not nearly enough people talk about the benefits of sharing their insecurities.

And it can help us generate problem statements, here are a few I’ve just come up with:

• As a writer, I don’t feel confident to share my insecurities.
• As a writer, I feel like I need to follow the crowd to get traction.
• As a writer, it’s hard to write about the stuff that makes me look weak.

And all of those problems can be solved by writing a new article. And here's a snapshot of an article that I wrote to solve this problem of not showing vulnerability in writing:

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Step 4: Build into your backlog

Your comments section then becomes your backlog.

Remember, writing that solves a problem and helps the reader become the person they want to be, wins.

I keep a working list of articles in my journal that I use as a working list of articles to write. They are built from evidence. Every time I read a comment or get a question about something, I ask myself, what problem is this person trying to solve?

Here is a snapshot of some of the problems in my backlog:

1. As someone who works a 9–5, I don’t think I’m a ‘true’ entrepreneur.
2. As someone who works a 9–5, I don’t have the time to write online.
3. As someone who works a 9–5, I don’t have the confidence to write

In each article I write, I keep that problem in mind. Some of my best ideas have come from working in this way, like this article:

This article was written from observing some simple ideas that have helped me

The step-by-step process for building your writing backlog

Coming up with ideas for great content doesn’t need to be complicated, your comments section provides a great opportunity to reverse-engineer what your readers want.

It’s as simple as:

1. Reviewing your comments section
2. Understanding in more detail
3. Writing a problem-statement
4. Building your backlog

If you do that, I promise you have endless ideas for content.

Hopefully that helps.