How to create 108 content ideas in 30 minutes

Content marketing cannot exist without content, and content cannot exist without ideas. But where do you get your ideas from?

Standard brainstorming sessions can be effective, but can also get sidetracked or dominated by those who shout the loudest. After debating each suggestion, you might find you come away with just a handful of workable ideas.

But what if there was a technique to help you come up with 108 ideas in just half an hour? 6-3-5 brainwriting is an ideation technique developed in 1968 by Bernd Rohrbach, a German marketer, to create a large number of ideas in a short space of time.

How it works

First of all, you need to ensure that everyone in your group understands the problem or brief, and that they’re aware of your target audience. If not, take a bit of time at the beginning to make sure everyone has a clear understanding of your goals, otherwise you might find yourself with ideas that aren’t suitable.

Next, get everyone sitting in a circle with paper or worksheets. Each piece of paper should have the problem at the top of the page and a 3 x 6 grid, labelled with ‘Idea 1’, ‘Idea 2’ and ‘Idea 3’ along the top, as well as the numbers 1 to 6 down the side.

Then, it’s time for ideas. Everyone in the group is given five minutes to each write down three ideas onto their grid (in row 1). This needs to be done in silence with no discussion.

Once the five minutes are up, participants need to pass their sheets to the person on their right. Then begins another five minutes, during which each participant lists their three ideas in row 2, taking inspiration from the previous ideas on the sheet.

This continues for six rounds until each person gets their first sheet back. By this point, you should have 108 ideas.

Grading ideas

While 108 ideas sounds great, it’s highly unlikely that each of these ideas will be useful or relevant, and you don’t want to progress with those that won’t work for your business or solve your problem.

You could use the NUF criteria to grade your ideas, and rate each out of 30. NUF stands for New, Useful and Feasible, so you simply go through each idea and rate it out of ten on each of these factors. Depending on the number of ideas, you might decide to go forward with the top ten suggestions, or perhaps all those with a rating of more than 20 out of 30.

Using NUF allows you to focus on the strongest ideas and not waste time on those that might not work. However, the beauty of 6-3-5 brainwriting is that all ideas are documented, so what might not work now could work later.