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For the first handful of years of SlopeFillers I posted every single weekday without fail. I wrote about great websites, bizarre ideas, new logos, exciting trends, and random thoughts. I built tools, I created games, I designed quizzes, and I did interviews. I covered social media, email, design, video, summer, winter, lifts, and snowmaking.

Not all of my posts were great, some were mediocre, but every week I usually had a couple nice hits. Every now and again I’d connect for a home run.

I often look back on that phase of my life and career and wonder how I was able to come up with so many great ideas. Or just ideas in general. How did I find so many unique angles and ideas and things to write about?

The more I’ve thought about it, the answer is pretty simple.

I had to because I’d publicly committed to it.

Commitments are fascinating things. This summer I committed to do a bike relay race with my in-laws and for the first time in years I got my legs back into solid shape. Why? The commitment forced me to. One of my other highlight marketing content series, The Stash / Tuesday Trends, was another example of this. I’m still amazing at how many unique datasets and questions we came up with. But, again, that creativity was born out of a commitment to post once a week. That’s what happened with SlopeFillers. That every weekday commitment forced me to push my creativity to limits I’d never taken it before.

If creativity was a muscle, it gave it good exercise.

Exercise and opportunities to try.

I’ve had lots of great ideas for content in the years since, but none have succeeded to anywhere near the level of SlopeFillers or Tuesday Trends. There could be other reasons, but I think the biggest is that I’ve been afraid to build in commitment. I’ve been afraid to force myself to keep it going even when I don’t have a great idea. Even though that challenge is also the thing that builds the creative muscle around a concept and gives it the chance to be great, to snowball, to turn into momentum.

Likewise, I have seen some incredible content ideas in the ski industry over the years. Ideas that are thoughtful and creative and strategic and check lots of boxes with little effort.

But very few of these ideas never lasted long enough to achieve their potential.

If content is part of your plan this winter, I’d encourage you to look at ways to add a layer of commitment to your strategy. Instead of a creating “a bunch of” videos, commit to a full, named series like Cash Quad. Instead of capture “lots of” good images throughout the season, commit to publishing one a day like Alta who is one of the last to still be doing a daily photo. Instead of rounding up great moments whenever you have a good story, make it a weekly ritual like LiftBlog does with Instagram Tuesday.

Ideas take work. You have a lot of other stuff – easier stuff – you could do that will be easy to revert back to when ideas are hard to come by. Building in commitment forces you to dig deeper and deeper into your creative barrel until you may be scraping the bottom for anything you can find.

But in my experience, some of the best ideas are towards the bottom and you’ll never uncover them if you’re only picking the easy stuff off the top.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.