MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

I learnt many things from advertising, including how to instantly and rapidly generate big ideas to explode your income. I'll begin by tackling the definition.

What is a Big Idea?

A big idea especially as relevant to our industry involves combining the "knew" and the "new".

'New' is something totally unrelated to the industry and 'knew' is something existing within the industry. When you combine them, you come up with something innovative which explodes your profits.

They may be 'big ideas' in terms of advertising campaigns, products, marketing or sales strategy.

Most people say that you can replicate success by using tried and true methods; many say that copywriting is swiping a few files to replicate success. It works in some cases but if you want to take your success to a whole new level, you need a big idea.

Clayton Marketplace says his biggest winners in terms of his copywriting and his letters were based on big ideas which, in their time, were almost revolutionary in nature. It's from such big ideas that accelerated growth can happen.

If you follow a predictable route, the growth will be predictable. Predictably high, perhaps, but if you want to go to the next level you need a big idea.

If I had to describe the foundation for big ideas, I'd talk about a monkey sitting at a typewriter. A thousand typing monkeys locked up in a room over a century will be able to produce work the quality of Shakespeare. What I mean is, when it comes to big ideas, it's all about the numbers. The eureka moment; the 'aha' moment is a myth. It's about quantity not quality.

How do you generate Big Ideas?

You don't sit there and meditate and suddenly one big idea comes out...No, really. It doesn't happen like that.

You sit down, and generate 50 ideas. Or 100 ideas. Or even better, 300 ideas. And from there, I bet you that at least one of them will be good enough to explode your business to the next level. That's the foundation --it's always a numbers game.

But, how do you generate as many ideas as you can, you're wondering? There are some who regard themselves gurus who can generate brilliant, problem-solving profit-booming ideas, instantly. However, the rest of us mere mortals need to keep trying and pushing.

This was how, in my previous life, I got hired as a copywriter although I had no prior experience. My boss told me to generate as many ideas as possible for three products. They didn't have to be good ideas, but I had to come up with as many fresh angles as possible.

Within the space of 3hours, I came up with 300 ideas...and I was hired on the spot.

This is the key:

Be Avant-garde Outside Your Own domain.

This key isn't just for generating big ideas, but for success in anything --even my success in advertising. In my time in advertising during which I won numerous awards, I attribute my success to this key. What's interesting is this: this key isn't from any business book.

It was actually from an author by the name of Edmund White on a commentary on Salon.com. He observed that artists are mostly only avant-garde in their own domains. Although they expose themselves to the finest of their own field, everything else they take in is just like what everyone else is taking in.

For example, as a marketer, if you want to be the best in your field, don't just study your field, marketing. When you do this, you create an incestuous loop, and you won't create new ideas because they're based on something someone else in marketing has done before. Even if you read many direct marketing and entrepreneurial books, you're still going round the same circle.

But, if you step out of that domain, if you start, in the words of Brian Vaszily, "immersing yourself in genius", where you immerse yourself in the greatest form of human expression and creativity in every single field, good ideas will come out from there.

Imagine that fruit are ideas and the soil is your imagination. The fertilizer then is to make sure that the soil is fertile and produces as much fruit as possible...that fertilizer consists of ideas outside your own domain, outside the realm of marketing.

But, here's a disclaimer:

The statement says no artist is avant-garde outside his own domain, and this basically means you MUST be an artist to begin with.

This means that in order for this to work, you must master marketing first. Before an outside idea can work, you must know the rules of Internet marketing before you can tap into being avant-garde outside your own domain.

If you are not a master of your own domain, if you are avant-garde outside your domain, everything will crumble because you don't have the proper foundation to know what's good or what works in your field.

Most copywriters say that to succeed in your industry, you have to be an expert in your field and in your products because when you know your product inside out, you can express it in new ways. It's probably part of the secret behind Agora's success.

There are many ways to tap into generating big ideas, but below are two fairly instant, practical ways to go about doing this. You have to immerse yourself in genius, in music and the arts, in different specialty magazines --you may find some good ideas. This is what I sometimes do. I call it funnel vision in practice.

How to generate a Big Idea

Funnel vision is a concept by Jay Abraham, the basic idea of which is this: if you look outside your own field into another domain, whatever is there --their cliches and norms --take them and apply them to your field and your products will soar. It's instant innovation, and there are two practical ways to do it.

i. From the Inside, Looking Out

Dan Kennedy says to list down all the norms of your industry --its standard picture poses, usual phraseology, etc. And then, you break and/or twist them, one by one.

ii. From the Outside, Looking In

Take another industry, list their traits and cliches, and apply them in your industry and in every aspect of how you run your business. E.g. if you take the example of an airline where they have free tickets and a check-in counter, think of how you would apply these to your business.

You can generate a lot of ideas using these two techniques. Listing the norms may take you a while, and just by twisting them you already have 20-30 ideas off the bat.

Overnight Test

To illustrate this, I would use the example of somebody sleeping. That's how simple it is. In advertising, it's called the overnight test.

A good idea at that time may be the most contemptible of ideas in the morning. You might think it a genius idea when you first come up with it, you might find it amazing, but sleep over it first and see if it's still a 'genius idea' in the morning.

If, in the morning, you are still equally excited about it, it most likely means yes, it is a good idea because it has passed the overnight test.

There are other idea-generating methods, and I'll continue to share these with you later. In the meantime, I am as usual curious to hear from you how the principles I am teaching you are affecting the way you do business. (Don't forget that other like-minded people are linked to your website when you comment on our blog!)

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About the Author

Kenneth Yu is a tormented artist, but he was determined not to be a starving one. This is the primary reason why this D&AD award-winning advertising creative has plunged into the world of Internet entrepreneurship, and the rest -- as they say -- is history. Straddling both the creative and business realm, Kenneth combines bullet-fast ideation and his vast experience working with the big brands to alchemize marketing gold as the Head Copywriter and Marketing Strategist in MindValley. He shares more out-of-the-box marketing and copywriting tips (plus cool irreverent stuff) on his Twitter

Check out other posts by Kenneth

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