How to Generate Content Ideas
We’ve talked about how to spark inspiration, now let’s talk about how to generate content based on that inspiration. Content can easily become saturated as competition for attention increases, that is why it’s important to find topics for your content that relate to your brand or campaigns.
Generating ideas for content can be both interesting and challenging, but thanks to the world wide internet, you have a ton of resources right at your fingertips! Here are somethings to keep in mind when generating content:
- What are your audiences habits?
- What are you competitors doing?
- What is your audience talking about?
- What are your SEO efforts
Understanding your audience personas and their habits will help you create better content that will follow along with their habits. Being aware of what your competitors are doing is another tactic, check out their content marketing efforts. If you share a similar audience it’s a safe assumption that what draws them to your competitors will also draw them to you – but beat them at it! Make sure your audiences are talking about the same things you are. That is how you know their interests. And finally, SEO efforts – there is a lot information out there about SEO so make sure you do your research. Make sure your website is properly verified with your domain and you can then view what queries users typed into Google to find your website and what type of topics you are ranking for.
One of our favorite ways to generate content? Brainstorming with others. We love our team, and everyone brings with them a fresh and unique perspective. Don’t have a team? That’s ok! Find a friend and bounce ideas off of them. You can also brain-dump. A brain-dump is an uninterrupted period of them (generally a few minutes) where you list all of the ideas that come to your mind. The goal: quantity, not quality. Don’t over think it, sometimes the best content comes from the craziest ideas.
You can also utilize online resources like Link Explorer, Quora, Pinterest, BuzzSumo, and Google Trends:
- Link Explorer is a tool that lets you see what pages on your competitors’ sites are getting the most links and where those are coming from. Knowing this can help you understand what content topics might resonate with your audience.
- Quora is site where people gather to ask questions that are important to them. If you see a question related to your business that is getting a lot of attention, it is probably time to start producing content around it.
- Pinterest is a great source for finding visual inspiration. The idea behind Pinterest is that it is essentially a web-based bulletin board or pin board. Hence the name Pinterest allowing you to pin your interests to different boards.
- BuzzSumo is a great tool to use to see what content is popular on social media. It really helps identify what type of content is performing based on a certain topic are based on competitors.
- Browse through related topics on Google Trends to see what is popular. By doing this you can identify other influential resources you may want to check out, in turn helping generate more content ideas. You can also search through related queries to see what search queries are most popular on Google at that time. Google Trends is also a great way to know what topics are trending.
Another great way to find inspiration on content is to ask the very people you are creating the content for. Both Facebook and Instagram offer a great ways to interact with your audience. Use Instagram polls and questions to gather feedback on what your audience wants to see or use Facebook to ask your audience questions directly.
Don’t forget about content you’ve already created. Refreshing and repurposing your existing content is a great way to give another chance to shine and make it visible to anyone in your audience that may have missed it originally.
While we can all agree that coming with new content ideas is difficult at times, we hope this has helped you with the process and enabled you to come up with some pretty darn good ideas! If it did, let us know, we’d love to hear from you!
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