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Coming up with new content ideas consistently can be hard, even when you know what you should be writing about strategically. Here are some places you can go for a little extra inspiration.
1. Ask your audience what they want
Social media is a great place to engage with your audience, so why not get some new content ideas from the horse’s mouth?
Create polls to invite people to choose between potential topics
Ask them what they want to know about or what their biggest challenges are
2. Look at what other people are doing.
I’m not saying that you should copy your competitors, but you can get inspiration from what they’re doing well, or what they’re missing!
Sign up to industry newsletters
Visit competitors’ websites
Check out competitors' social media feeds to see what is popular
3. Dig into their conversations
There are already people out there talking about what they want to know about. What if you could eavesdrop?
Are there forums specific to your industry that have useful content?
Quora provides a whole world of questions and answers. You can see which types of questions are asked frequently and how people are phrasing those questions. If they’re writing them like that on Quora, that’s probably how they’re putting questions into Google.
Facebook groups and LinkedIn are good places to drop into to see what people are talking about.
4. Group your ideas
When you come up with one new content idea, why stop there? It’s just more efficient to come up with five themed ideas when you have an initial idea and less work in the long run.
Could you split that idea up into a series? I love doing a series. It means people can read the whole thing, navigate to what they want, and I have enough content for a while. Here’s a series I did on how to create a marketing plan and it worked out to be eight weeks worth of blogs,
If you’re writing on a theme, are there different questions you could ask around that theme? For example, I’m selling golf clubs and I want to write about golf swings, what are all the different circumstances that people want to know about different golf swings? Here’s one: Which golf swing is best for getting out of sand? Here’s another: Which swing is best for getting out of water? Here’s yet another: Which swing should I use on the last hold? Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about golf, but you get the idea.
5. Build on what’s working
If you’re running out of ideas, that’s probably because you have been creating marketing content for your business for a while. On the upside, that means that you have something you can analyze.
Your old blogs – what do people like to read and respond to? Which are the most popular blogs in terms of readers and engagement?
Email marketing – What do people click on?
Social media – What do people engage the most with?
Website – Which pages are most popular?
Another great marketing trick is to reuse older content or adapt it. In fact, last year I wrote a blog series on staying consistent with your marketing which contains a whole load of tips along those lines.
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