Ep. 118 – HELP! I’ve RUN OUT of IDEAS! And TikTok Recipes – Good or Bad? Ask Us ANYTHING

Foreign. Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

Welcome back to Ask Us Anything from Do this, not that. This is our super short episode where we answer one work question and one ridiculous question.

We get questions in all week long, and if you want to submit one, all you got to do is go to jschwedelson.com podcast and there's a big button that says ask us anything. And you could submit anything. Could be totally bananas. And we'll try to answer it here.

And also, we still have our longer episode at the end of the week, so let's jump into it. What is our work question? We got a question from Carrie from Nashville, Tennessee.

Oh, Nashville's a hot topic in my world right now because I go on an annual guy strip every year and. And we debate where we should go. And right now, we got Nashville, we got Salt Lake City, we got Seattle.

I'm pulling for Nashville because I've never been, so we'll see what happens. I don't know. All right, Carrie, what is your work question? Here it is, Jay. I've hit a wall. I have nothing new to share on social.

I have nothing new to write about in my company's newsletter. My company has nothing new to share in terms of tactics. We need ways to get through this block help. You know, I think a lot of us run into this.

We feel like we have nothing new to say, that we're being repetitive, we're being boring. We have no new content to share. We just have run out of ideas. Maybe it's run out of podcast episode ideas. Run out of ideas, period.

So, first off, there are a couple of tools that I love using for idea generation that I don't know enough people leverage. One, it's absolutely incredible. It's called Perplexity. Now, Perplexity is an AI tool. It's a hundred percent free.

It is as easy to use as ChatGPT or Gemini or any of the other tools. Okay? You don't pay for it, and the URL is Perplexity AI.

But the reason I love Perplexity and it's my favorite AI tool, is that when you go to it and you ask it a question, you know, give me 20 ideas about ideas for a blog about construction industry related topics or whatever, it not only gives you the ideas, but with all the different in pieces of information it gives you, it actually provides sources of where the information is coming from. So these little circles are next to the output of whatever it gives you.

And then if you click on the circles, it is leading to a website of where the information came from. Right? And a lot of times it'll be four or five pieces of information that are part of that one answer that it gave you.

And unlike ChatGPT, perplexity is linked to the Internet, meaning that it links to all these articles and blogs and downloads and content and things. So it's a great way to find all sorts of new ideas.

And then the last piece of what Perplexity does is that after you ask the question that you want to ask it, it gives you suggestions on how to ask your question in a better way. So it assists you in prompt writing, which is very, very valuable to me because I'm horrible at writing prompts on these different AI tools.

So that's Perplexity AI, another tool that I think is awesome that I don't think anybody really uses for idea generation. Whether it's a newsletter, a blog, a piece of content, a webinar, doesn't matter. Semrush has something that's great. SEM Rush.

If you go to SEMrush.com topic research, that's SEMrush.com topic-research. It has this tool where you could put whatever topic it is that you're thinking about talking about.

Let's say I want to do do podcast episodes on email marketing or whatever you put in any topic. And the thing spits out a zillion ideas. It is unbelievable. So check out Semrush's topic research generator. Love this thing.

And then the last thing on this topic is I think the mistake that we all make. Whether you're an individual, whether you're a business, whether you're responsible for the resource tab of your company, whatever it is.

I think we all all fall into the trap of thinking that everybody already knows the things that we're going to talk about, right? So if I want to talk about, oh, I'm going to share some ideas about email subject lines because that's part of my world.

Sometimes I'll be like, oh no, everybody already knows that you should do blah blah, blah in the subject line. I'm not going to talk about that. And you probably feel that way for whatever industry or sector or business that you're in. But here's the truth.

Number one, there are new people entering into your sector and your world, okay? All the time. And those are the people that are trying to consume the information, to learn, so they don't know what you think everybody knows. Okay?

And then when you do share stuff, no matter how hard you try, only a fraction of your network, your audience, your database, the people that are in your world are seeing what it is that you're putting out there. And sometimes people need to be told multiple times they have to be reminded of certain things.

So never be shy or reluctant or feel that you're being repetitive in what it is that you're sharing. Because a lot of times, the basics that you think are the basics are the most valuable things.

Okay, before we get to the absolute ridiculous question, which of course is ridiculous, I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is the email sending platform that I use to send out all of my emails.

It's great for loyalty marketing, relationship marketing, SMS marketing. You got to check out Marigold. I promise you small, medium, large email senders, if you're not checking out Marigold, you're making a mistake.

All right, let's get into the ridiculous question. We got a question from Maddie from Fort Lauderdale. I used to live in Fort Lauderdale. Love Fort Lauderdale. I mean, hot, 100% in the summer, good food.

Yes, very into Fort Lauderdale. All right, what's the question, Jay? Do you care about food trends on TikTok and have you tried any of them?

Especially the new one where people are ordering Dr. Pepper with pickles from fast food restaurants? This is an absolutely ridiculous question.

Number one, I did see this trend where people are going and ordering Dr. Pepper and putting pickles in their Dr. Pepper because it's new. It's a trend on TikTok. That one seems absolutely ridiculous. And I'm not on board that because I don't even understand it.

But this whole thing, of course, food trends coming off of TikTok and trying them is awesome. I'm very pro. I don't like the dangerous ones where you make you eat something that could hurt you or any of that stuff. I'm not into that.

But in my home we've actually tried a lot of these recipes that like go trending on Tick Tock and they're really, really good. Some of them are gross, some of them are totally gross. But for example, this idea of baked feta pasta, this went viral on TikTok.

And my son comes home, he goes, we gotta have baked feta pasta. I'm like, what is that? And he breaks it all down. We watched the video, we made it, it was great.

But on the flip side, then my daughter came home, said we should try the Oreo mug cake where you make like this disgusting, gooey Oreo thing in a mug. That was disgusting. It wasn't good at all.

Oh, the most disgusting one that's trending on TikTok is this cream cheese and bell peppers, where you stuff a bell pepper with cream cheese. First of all, that's disgusting. You know what else is disgusting? Sushi that has cream cheese. That's disgusting.

I don't know why that's on any menu that's not part of TikTok. I just think it's disgusting. So anyway, I'm very into these TikTok food trends, but not the dangerous ones.

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you should check it out because it's like social proof for recipes at massive scale. So yeah, all in on that. Don't eat cream cheese and sushi. Thanks for being here. Check out our longer episode on Fridays.

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