Coming Up With New Content Ideas
11 ways to think about new content ideas
- Conduct interviews
- Go to Quora
- Ask your social networks
- Go to your competitor websites
- Brainstorm ideas
- Google search engine
- YouTube
- Create a swipe file
- Product reviews
- Open your newspaper and see current events
- Sign up for newsletters
- List down all the questions your customers ask you all the time
- List 50 Questions (see below for details)
Go on Quora
Quora is literally a question-and-answer website. Go to Quora, type the key topic that you want to generate create on. Answer the questions in your own voice. Voila, you have content.
Ask Your Social Networks
Go on to your Twitter or your prefered social network and ask.
I went on my LinkedIn and frame the question to be specific to about content. Don't be afraid to ask.
Think and List 100 Questions
The ultimate content strategy is listening.
We learn all the time, especially when we listen. We listen to customers, to employees, to the news, to tv, to podcasters.
Then go and brainstorm your content ideas.
The challenge is to think about 100 questions.
If you haven't come up with at least half of a hundred ideas, it means you haven't tried hard enough.
Think about it, if you write two times per week, that's a whole lot of content for a year.
Buy and open a notebook, scribble "My Idea Book" and make a list of questions that your audience would love to know more about.
Remember, there are no wrong answers. Don't think and analyse - keep writing these questions down. You can always filter out the best ones later.
The point of this exercise is to train your brain to think of ideas. The more you do, the more you can think of new content ideas easier.
My two favourite tools are:
Answer The Public: Based on data pulled from Google, your submitted keyword will be extracted based on popularity. This is especially useful as the question submitted are what users type in Google's search engine.
Ubersuggest by Neil Patel: Very similar to 'Answer the Public', you submit a keyword or topic and it responds back with information and numbers associated with the search and the difficulting ranking for it. You also get a long list of keyword ideas related to your input.
