concepts for creating fresh, interesting, and useful content were failing me at one point.
Kevin Robert’s quote, “Ideas are the currency of the future,” dawned on me. I realised I needed to alter my approach.
Ingenious concepts are built on a foundation of logic, facts, and feelings. I use a variety of tools and surveys, as well as logic-focused tricks, to achieve these goals. Here are a few ideas to get you started on coming up with great content your audience will love.
1. Pay attention to what’s going on in your field.
To stay current or to learn more about your company’s niche, conduct web research and analysis. Make a spreadsheet to keep track of all of the different websites you’ve visited.
Look for research tidbits or data-backed points on these websites and use them to inspire your own work.
2. Use an aggregator to collect information.
Useful content and products can be found on blog aggregators like Alltop.com, BizSugar.com, and Blog Engage.
Let’s use an example: I take ten excellent articles, extract interesting information, and then create amazing content based on what I learned from them. Including a link to the original source is critical because it not only acknowledges the original author but also lets your readers know your content is reliable.
Despite the fact that each aggregator works differently, most allow you to perform one-time searches or register for ongoing monitoring of specific subjects.
3. Ask for suggestions from the public
People enjoy having their thoughts or opinions solicited. Surveys are a great place to start.
Collecting feedback from your target audience will help you better understand their problems, needs, and motivations. People can go overboard with their wildest suggestions from time to time.
I recommend using Survey Anywhere to create simple and sophisticated online surveys for your customers, partners, and industry experts.
If you don’t already have a database to target, you should use a service like Pollfish to get qualified responses from your ideal custom audience.
You can also use your social media accounts to ask questions and conduct polls. Asking questions in Facebook groups to gather information for my articles has yielded excellent results for me.
In addition to generating new content ideas, getting these responses will help you use unique data, research or statistics as a valuable linkable asset to feed your content and feed your content.
4. Go online and look for new ideas for posts.
Forums are a never-ending source of inspiration. The number of great ideas and life experiences that people have to offer may astound you. Warrior Forum members are responsive, open-minded, and willing to share their tips and tricks, which appeals to me as a writer in the marketing industry.
Quora is yet another useful platform for people to ask and answer questions about topics that interest them. Using this method, you can learn a lot about the wants and needs of your intended audience. Prior to doing anything, you’ll need to set up a profile, which you should do as soon as possible. After that, you’ll be able to:
- Come up with discussion points.
- You can set up alerts to be notified whenever your chosen blogs, experts, or topics are mentioned in conversations.
- Try out your theories by posing a question and offering a potential solution.
- See which topics get the most upvotes and conversations on Reddit to discover a new angle for your blog post.
- Use keywords to see what questions (headlines) people are asking about the topics you’re interested in. The most frequently asked questions, as well as the number of upvotes, show how popular this issue is.
Among the other places to keep an eye on trends are the following online communities:
Use MetaFilter to narrow your results.
Frequently Asked Questions on FOX (question analyzer from BuzzSumo)
Groups on Facebook and LinkedIn are also excellent places to generate new ideas for blog posts. While many of these groups are full of self-promotion and spam, the ones that are worthwhile can yield some interesting and useful insights. Look for unique and closed (private) communities in your industry where members actively participate in discussions, share the most valuable insights, tell personal stories, get solutions to their problems and describe their products or services. Look for these communities.
A great resource for content marketers is B2B Bloggers Boost Group. Every day, members discuss what they’re working on or promote what they’ve created that’s of high quality.
Creating e-books, podcasts, or videos? These online communities can be a source of inspiration for you.
Investigate the book listings on Amazon.
On iTunes, you can find well-known podcasts.
Watch TED talks and popular YouTube videos.
SlideShare is a good place to find relevant presentations.
5. Keep an eye on the competition
Analyze the content and user engagement of your competitors to identify areas where your brand can provide a different point of view or a different way of thinking. In addition to being able to identify sources, the content of your competitors allows you to comment on their posts and mention your brand.
I use SE Ranking to keep tabs on the competitors’ whereabouts and content. It displays the most effective content in terms of keyword performance. You can easily keep tabs on which pages on a website are the most popular, and look for any interesting trends.
6. Come together as a group
I’d like to share with you a priceless tip I’ve learned over the years: roundup articles always sell out.
Experts can be polled to get their thoughts on a current event, a trend, or a thorny issue. Creating this type of content gets a lot of shares, and I’ve done it before. Additionally, it’s a wonderful opportunity to network with influential people in your field.
You don’t have to be friends with the experts to learn something new. MyBlogU is a great resource for finding out what other people think about a topic. One of the most exciting features on this platform has to be the group interview. You ask a question, and the experts answer it.
7. Take a pen or a whiteboard with you.
It’s not getting started with content creation now that you’ve got a lot of idea-generation resources at your disposal. To be effective, connect the thoughts so that they enhance one another and provide a unique perspective.
Even though it may seem silly, using a whiteboard or sticky notes to organise your thoughts before writing a first draught is a great idea.
This series of Whiteboard Friday articles has me wondering whether or not Moz’s Whiteboard starts with his original presentation and then adapts as each article is written. Either way, they demonstrate how to effectively link various aspects of a single subject.
8. Attend online conference sessions
Great concepts can be gleaned from conference presentations. You can use the trending topics as inspiration to come up with original content of your own. Make a list of the questions and answers that other people have to offer.
Using SEO as an example, I sought content inspiration. There were four topics on the brightonSEO conference agenda that would be perfect for my content. I added them to my Google Sheets file.
9. Investigate the details of your conversions.
Use your site analytics to find out what your audience likes, explore user behaviour from various sources, and identify weak points if you want to go after more content gold. You can create persuasive content that converts once you understand your converted customers’ entire journey.
Use Finteza to learn why people leave your site and how to make your content more likely to lead to sales. The tool has a visual representation of the audience’s journey from the first visit to the last step in the conversion process. This information can assist you in learning more about your site’s users and in coming up with new content ideas that will resonate with your target audience.
Use sales collateral, product demos, and testimonials if you’ve run out of top-of-funnel ideas.
10. get inspired from the signs in the world around you.
To find new ideas for blog posts, look to the internet’s many creative resources. Deposit photos is my top pick because it encourages and supports users in their quest to discover new content options and quickly locate exactly what they need.
More than 210 million files can be found on Deposit photos, with everything from illustrations and videos to photos and music spanning every price range. Any content can be searched for based on a variety of criteria using the advanced search filters on the site.
The Big Picture
When will this conflict over my writing be resolved? The truth is, there are no hard and fast rules for how to make your content extraordinary. Unfortunately. Continuous improvement can only be achieved through hard work and practice.
