If you have some downtime right now, a great use of that time might be to create a backlog of content for your blog or newsletter.

If you write a weekly post, you could knock out enough content for at least the next few weeks.

If that’s too much, the next best thing is to use the time to find ideas.

Look at your competition’s content. Look at blogs written by or for your target market. Look at general consumer or business publications for ideas that might be useful or interesting to your target market.

In a few hours, you could come up with hundreds of ideas.

All you need to do is write down a sentence or two, a quote or interesting fact, a few points you want to cover, and a link to the article or post that inspired you.

But don’t stop there. Once you have one idea, think about how you could expand it into ideas for additional content.

Let’s say you come across an article about legislative changes in your field and you want to write about those changes–what they are, what they mean, what you think about them, or what the reader needs to do to comply with or take advantage of them.

You could do a second article sharing feedback about the changes from some of your clients. Or comments about the changes from a fellow lawyer or allied expert.

Another article might be about additional changes you’d like to see that weren’t addressed in the legislation.

If you like this idea but don’t have enough time right now, spend an hour making a list of possible sources you can peruse later. Explore a legal blog directory, for example, and capture links to some that look promising.

Where do you start this process? On your hard drive. Find all of your old content and think about what you could do to reuse or re-purpose it.

You might have a paper or presentation you could republish in your newsletter. You might update an old blog post, expanding on something you wrote before, amending your opinion, or providing additional examples. If it’s been awhile since you first published it, you could even re-publish it as is.

Take some time to dig and find ideas. When things get back to normal, you’ll be glad you did.

For more ideas for content than you can shake a stick at, and advice on how to use them, my email marketing course has you covered.