Top 10 Effective Ways to Generate Content Ideas for Content Strategy
Consistency in your content is essential for engagement of the audience. For a business you don’t want your content to appear once in a blue moon which will eventually lead to disinterested visitors. Now, there lies a sweet spot between posting too much content of the same sort and posting very little quality content but with long gaps.
A business can generate blog content ideas every day. Content may seem like an exhaustible source, one would often be scared to run out of variety or topics to create content about though generating content is all about the ideas. Ideas for content creation could be derived from things around us and by following a routine to ensure you are able to derive the ideas for fresh content every day.
The routine adds on to your process and helps you train your mind to pick up content ideas around you. Here are few things that you can try out:
a) Reading a marketing blog everyday:
A good way to excel in blog content pieces is to first start by reading a lot of content. A marketing blog will not only be extremely informative but will also help your improve your marketing strategies.
b) Reading any other article:
Marketing articles are informative but focusing on one type narrows down limits of your content creation. You read about marketing and write about it too which makes writing anything else harder. An audience might not always look for informative style content. Reading a good variety of content gives you different voices to try on for your own content.
c) Analyse your Audience:
Knowing your target Audience is essential in every field of work if you do not know your target audience well enough how will you generate content ideas for them? After a while you will reach an impasse because you don’t know what your audience needs, wants, likes, finds interesting or even shares. The content they like will get shared a lot and the shared content can help you with inputs for things you can do differently.
d) Look out for viral content:
As a content developer you must check out the type content that has gone viral. Keeping a track of such content not only keeps you updated about the trends and the new culture but also helps you identify factors that you can use to create compelling & viral content.
e) Go through your old content:
There is no better way to understand your audience and the changes than through going your old content. You get to know what sort of content worked in the past with your audience and which is more preferred. Self analysis of the content is essential as it tells you what works and what might not work. One could improve their standards of writing and it will help you show if you have made progress from the past or not.
10 Effective ways to generate content ideas everyday!
1) Create a content calendar:
Content calendars are exactly what they sound like: a mechanism used to plan, share, and most importantly organize content. The biggest benefit of using a calendar format, rather than lists, is that you can visualize how your content will be built and distributed throughout the year. This allows you to:
Build and publish content around and on the important events in your industry or key dates;
Find gaps in your content ideas, giving you plenty of time to plan ahead to generate content for these gap periods
Make sure you have your content ready in plenty of time to publish.
Generally, the better you plan your content publishing, the better placed you are to produce a consistent flow of content. This then builds your brand’s perceived image in your chosen subject areas. Looking at the year ahead, you can foresee industry or world events that you want to plan content around and the content calendar is the mechanism to store and manage this information.
You can have a look at our blog about how to create a content calendar here.
2) Experiment with the variety of content:
Sticking to a certain kind of content like blogs and posts limits your horizon of creativity with the content. Generating new content ideas with your usual content type can be difficult. Experimenting with content will give you endless ideas for your content.
3) Group similar content together:
If you have little or small content on a subject you can group similar topics or subtopics on that subject together. Cumulate fresh or previously posted content which makes it easier for the readers to find all the information in one place and they can depend on you for finding the desired information.
4) Use a Formula:
Creating an outline for your posts is like making a formula for your posts which would make content creation everyday much easier. A nice simple formula might look like: Headline, Image, Introduction, Video, Content, Transcription, Call-to-action, Recap, Done. You can create your own personalised content which can be easily identified by your readers with your formula. Many readers will prefer and acknowledge the consistency.
5) Be aware of the current affairs & trends:
Keep track of what is trending and the happening in the world. This is the best way to generate quick and unplanned content. Companies like Zomato and Amul have created a huge base of content on this for their social media. Updating yourself with everyday news and the current affairs also let you know what is upcoming in your area of functioning. Current affairs and trends are a topic generating machine that never runs out of topics. There will be always something you could create content out of and would also attract a lot of readers.
Here is an article on the content marketing trends of 2018.
6) Work in batches:
Working everyday is ideal but creating content in batches is extremely efficient. Similar type of content can be grouped and created together like videos. They can be shot on one day and then edited the together. Working in batches makes you be prepared for the week or month ahead. You will have a bunch of content ready to go out. It also helps you to focus only on one task in that day for example if you are writing articles, you could write 2–3 articles in one day and just edit and design them the other day.
7) Have a purpose:
Quality takes priority over quantity. Creating content for the sake of generating content everyday is something that one should not do. Content low on quality is as good as no content generated. Have a purpose and create content that helps you achieve your goals.
8) Develope Theme
Develop a theme so you know where your content strategy is headed. A series of content can be created to generate new content. One can link similar content together to develop a theme like a way is to showcase your brand. Highlighting your customers, sharing surprising facts about your industry, profiling leaders in your space, introducing employees, providing quick how-to tips in your space, showcasing moments in the history in your industry or related to your products or services. Fresh happenings and revisiting evergreen topics creates an interesting mix for audiences following your brand. Developing a theme keeps you on track for generating a similar yet different content everyday.
9) Research & work on long form content everyday:
Another form of content that can be worked on everyday are long form content like white papers, E-books, and original research. Such type of content needs to be worked in chapters and then posted together after compilation. The research for long form content will actually help pass valuable information to your audience & also drive more traffic to your content.
10) Find Fresh Stories:
Even after all these steps, there will be a point when you will run out of topics to create content about, this is when you need to start finding fresh stories. Stories are around you. Share stories from people you follow. Leaders that have left an impact on you and how they have successfully created powerful content. Get inspired! Look from a different point of view and take inspiration from different sources and look for a mix of opportunities to create content in advance and react to what’s happening in real time. By pulling inspiration from multiple sources, you’ll keep your content fresh and audiences engaged. Another way to generate fresh content is to just ask your audience what they want. This will not only increase engagement but as a brand the readers will feel more connected to it. Keep a lookout for opportunities to spot fresh stories.
Over to you
Generating content everyday may seem difficult, but with the techniques mentioned above, it is quite simple for even an amateur to develop relevant and exciting content, everyday. As the famous management thinker Jim Collins often says — “Discipline amplifies creativity, rather than stifling it.” By applying these tools, cultivating the right habits and adopting a long term game plan, one can amplify existing content into a winning content strategy.
Originally published at wittypen.com on March 7, 2018.
