Content themes: how to not run out of things to say by week four

The first two weeks of posting are easy. You have been saving up ideas for months: the story of how the company started, the big lesson from last year, the thing you wish clients knew. By week four those are gone, and every Monday starts with a blank page and the same question: what do I post today?

The fix is to decide in advance what your posts are allowed to be about. A small set of content themes, chosen once, gives every writing session a starting point and stops the feed drifting.

What a theme is

A theme is a subject you know well enough to write about for a year and that your readers care about. It is broader than a single post idea and narrower than your whole industry. 'Marketing' is too wide. 'The first ad campaign for a small software company' is too narrow. 'Paid acquisition for early-stage software companies' is about right.

Why four

One theme gets repetitive. Ten themes make the feed feel scattered, and readers cannot say what you are known for. Four is enough variety to keep a daily cadence interesting and few enough that someone who reads a dozen of your posts can describe what you do.

How to find your four

1. Start with your website. The services or product features you describe there are what you want to be known for.
2. List the questions clients and prospects ask most often. Each cluster of questions can become a theme.
3. List what you know from experience that most people in your field do not. That is where the receipts and findings come from.
4. Write down what readers should think of when they see your name in a year.
5. Pick four subjects that cover those lists with the least overlap. Write each as one line.

Example themes

For a fractional finance lead who works with startups:

• Cash runway and forecasting for companies under 30 people.
• Preparing for a first funding round: what investors ask for and how to have it ready.
• Pricing and billing decisions and their effect on cash.
• Finance tools and processes that save time for a founder doing their own books.

For a two-person design studio that builds websites for architects:

• How architects win work through their website, with examples from projects.
• Photography and presentation of built work online.
• Running a small studio: pricing, scoping, working with clients.
• Website decisions that matter less than people think, and the few that matter more.

Rotate through them

Once you have four themes, deal your posts across them so no single theme takes over. At a daily cadence, each theme comes up about once a week. When one theme feels exhausted for now, give it a rest and let the others carry the week. Themes also combine: a pricing decision can be told through a finding from client work.

Generate ideas inside each theme

A theme is a prompt you can keep coming back to. Run each one through a few angles and you will have more ideas than slots.

• A framework: the steps or questions you use.
• A number: something measured in your own work.
• A finding: something you noticed that goes against common advice.
• A mistake: something that went wrong and what changed afterwards.
• A question: something a client asked this month and the answer.

Four themes times five angles is twenty post ideas before you have written anything, and each angle can come back many times with new material.

Keep a running list for each theme in whatever note app you already use. When a client asks a good question or a number surprises you, add a line under the matching theme. By the next writing session, most of the thinking is done.

Review them every quarter

Themes should change as the business does. Every three months, look at the posts under each theme. If one theme never produced a post you were proud of, replace it. If a new service or product has become important, give it a theme. The goal is a feed that describes what you do now.

How GoodSocials handles this

GoodSocials writes four themes for each profile from your website at onboarding, and you can edit them at any time. New ideas are spread across all four, so the board keeps finding things to say after the homepage is used up.