Where do you go to find content ideas? Eight tricks to try when you are out of inspiration

GENERATING content ideas on a regular basis can be a daunting task; if you are blogging to a schedule and a planned calendar, the risk is that you become anxious about creating enough relevant and interesting content to engage your audience. While you may be blogging with the intent to prove yourself an expert in your field, you may have concerns about being expert enough and finding sufficient diverse content in order to sustain interest and generate leads.

Eight ways to tease out new content ideas

1. Identify your most critical news sources. What do you read that you can share with your audience that is helpful and relevant to certain members of your audience. If you are tracking and sharing news from these sources, use them as a basis for your articles – you can draw out an argument, disagree with them, develop the ideas further. Set up google alerts to email you keyword-triggered content and make use of these articles as launching pads.


2. What specific industry news or channels can you tap into for ideas about what is happening now in your industry? LinkedIn’s news channels and groups can be useful in this respect, as can industry-specific websites


3. What questions do your customers have or exist within your industry that are neglected or not often answered? A considered answer to a widespread issue could provide valuable content to your audience.


4. Do you have offline content – collateral, training manuals, customer service scripts, questions from actual customers, and so on – that could be adapted and amended to help drive your content creation? Are your sales colleagues asking for specific content support that you can provide and also extend?


5. What content are your competitors creating? What are they doing that you can imitate, what can you do better, what holes are there in your competitors’ content that you could plug from your perspective. Don’t copy, but I am sure there are occasions when competitor information will jump you over an ideas block


6. Some people are more visual than others, so if linear note-taking isn’t for you, try mindmapping your way to a list of new content ideas. This is a great way to extend topic areas and reach deeper into a topic by visual association.


7. What are your site metrics telling you? Are customers looking for content that isn’t yet available, do they want more than you have about areas of your business? Spending time mining your metrics will give you valuable knowledge about how your site content is performing, and content ideas about how you can respond to your audience’s needs.


8. Think audience, think angle, and think channel – by thinking around a topic you may find different ways in to introduce or extend a point you thought you had already made; your main keywords can be mined in this way.

When you are generating content ideas, remember to keep focused on your reasons for generating content, to create only content that will genuinely help your audience, and most especially what will make them recommend, act as an advocate, or buy from you.

Do you have any go-to places and sources for content ideas? Do you have favourite resource or tactics to ensure you keep the content flow going? If you are struggling to generate enough content to drive your content marketing strategy, get in touch and I would be happy to discuss how I can help you develop ideas and properly execute a robust content marketing plan for your business.