And this is the Brainstorm Buddy App
I'm the creator of the Brainstorm Buddy App, the first automated content idea analyzer tool. And you're probably wondering what my credentials are. I get it: after all, I know I would want to know that the person I'm taking advice from is an actual expert. So here goes:
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I started freelance writing in 1997, and quickly landed assignments with top magazines like Redbook, Family Circle, Inc., Wired, and Health. In all, I wrote for more than 250 magazines over the years, from well-known newsstand magazines to industry trade pubs. I generated hundreds (maybe even thousands) of article ideas, some of which were a hit and some of which were a miss—and I earned from the hits and learned from the misses.
Over time, I became a go-to writer for many of these publications (meaning I no longer had to pitch them...they just came to me with work).
In 2003, I co-authored The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success and From Pitch to Published (published by Marion Street Press), both of which have become classics in the writing world. My co-author and I also ran the multiple-award-winning Renegade Writer Blog for 10 years.
In 2005, I developed an online class called "Write for Magazines," where I taught hundreds of students the secrets of developing article ideas that sell.
To help my students, I created an "idea filter" that showed writers how to take a just-okay idea and tweak it until it was salable. Later, Carol Tice and I co-founded Useful Writing Courses, where we taught thousands of students on topics like how to escape the content mills and how to pitch magazines and websites.
In the meantime, as businesses started recognizing the importance of using journalism best practices to produce more authoritative and trustworthy content, my magazine writing morphed into content writing, strategizing, and training for business clients like Intel, Best Buy, Adweek, GE, and Qualtrics—and I discovered that the same methods I used to develop salable magazine article ideas could be used for content like blogs, white papers, and even social media posts.
I already knew that most freelance writers had trouble coming up with salable ideas. I now also discovered, from talking with my clients, that the process of developing a killer idea—which was intuitive to me after more than 20 years of pitching magazines—was time consuming and frustrating for content pros as well, both on-staff and freelance.
So I decided to synthesize my process into an easy-to-use tool—and created the Brainstorm Buddy App.
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My math degree-holding husband helped put the logic together. Thanks to this, I was able to transform Brainstorm Buddy from a simple filter to a robust and granular tool. The answers are weighted; this means some of the items are more important than others, and the score of some answers depends on the score of others.
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So that's me...and how I developed the Brainstorm Buddy App. Please do subscribe to give yourself the gift of great content ideas!