How to Come Up With Content Ideas?

Coming up with ideas to write about is hard...

As with my post yesterday, the hardest thing is to start. Once you’ve put pen to paper, it all becomes a little easier. It’s the same with ideas, you need to get them out of your head and written down — then you can start to build a clearer action plan.

I pulled in the BlueGlass team as part of our Friday lunch and learn today to brainstorm around how to come up with content ideas:

We were all in agreement with the starting point — it has to start with your audience.

• Who are you writing for?
• What do they want to see?
• Which topics are relevant to them?

Once you’ve established the audience, then you can start your research:

• What’s worked well in the past? Any key trends/topics/types of content that typically work well?
• Who are the top publishers and influencers within your space? How did they get there, what can you learn, can you piggy-back from it?
• Market analysis on the hot topics, any seasonality trends or upcoming events that you can cover?

Once you’ve figured this out — you need to be able to have something of value that you can offer to the audience.

The sweet spot is the intersection between your audience’s interest and your knowledge:

Focus is key. Once you’ve identified who you’re writing for, you can start to dig deep to come up with a list of ideas on where you can add value:

• What are common pain-points and challenges you (or your customers) typically face?
• Tell them something you don’t know based on your experience — try looking back over your calendar to see what meetings or events you’ve been too, also look back through your notes (I often * the ideas that I think could be developed further as blog posts). The challenge is then writing them!
• What data do you have that no-one else has access to — likewise it could be data that is already public, but under-performing. You could give it a new lease of life, by taking it out of the boring PDF format and making it more visually appealing.
• Answer common questions? Some of my best posts in the past have come from emails to clients, where I’ve written to an audience of one initially. Try answering some Quora posts too, then the popular answers can become posts you write-up in more detail.
• Don’t think about it — go for a walk, take a shower (with a waterproof notepad, of course) and switch off a little — these are often when the best ideas happen, it’s rarely at a desk.
• Force it — the opposite of the above, but just start writing ideas, at this stage you shouldn’t care if they are good or bad, you just want to get into the habit. If it takes you 20 ideas to come up with 1 good one, that’s fine, you’ve started. Just aim for 19 next time…

Hopefully once you’ve gone through this process, you should have a list of ideas to get started from — now you just need to write them!

About The Author

Kevin Gibbons is a co-founder of Re:signal. You can connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.