Last minute content. What to write about when you suddenly lack the ideas

Suffering from a creative crisis? Has the muse left you? Yes, although we know that the copywriting is, first of all, not art but work, after writing a large number of characters per week, sometimes everyone feels exhausted. Today we will not talk about the content plan, which, yes, everyone should have, to prevent these confusing situations. In any case, all fall into such ones, and it is that exact moment when you need these tips on how to quickly generate the content idea.

• Suggest your audience the list of educational material in your field. Think you know dozens of such, so just share those you consider being the best ones with a small description of each one. It causes surprisingly many attention, especially taking into consideration that there are dozens of such materials on the web. But, for example, my article on the best resources to learn SEO became one of the most successful ones, although it took a minimum of effort in its creation.
• Describe the history of your business. Tell the audience how the idea was born, how you developed your business at the first periods etc.
• Feel free to share your fuckups; people adore it. Half a year ago I wrote the material about how Serpstat screwed up with the bilingual Facebook page, and it still brings traffic.
• Show the private kitchen of your company. Get the audience acquainted with your team, your working environment. You can even arrange the special feature and, for example, every Friday present one of your team members and tell his/her history.

Don’t doubt to light even minor events, for example, like how your team is getting ready for the conference or conquesting the marathon.

Besides the fact that this is why you will always have what to write about, the main thing is that is how your audience understands that there are the real people behind the product.

• Conduct the small interview with one of your leading specialists, or make a blitz interview with all (part of) your employees. Another option is, for example, to establish monthly column and represent the interviews with influencers of your field there.
• Create a quiz for your readers; it’s fast and easy with tools like Qzzr. Everyone enjoys creative, funny quizzes, but likely you will need lots of inspiration to prepare such, and my article is dedicated to the times when you’re not. So you can create the knowledge quiz dedicated to your field. For example, take a look at that simple test by Search Engine Land on the knowledge of SEO. I swear that it took 30 minutes to prepare it but it’s bringing tons of traffic.
• Drop into your competitor’s blog to see what articles there are the most popular. Take a look at them, choose the one that best matches to your blog and try to create something on the same topic but better. If there’s no “most popular material” section on your competitor’s blog, use Serpstat, or another tool with the Top Pages feature (Ahrefs, Megaindex etc.) to discover that articles.

• Compile your previous materials and create the list of your best articles of the week/month/year.
• Create the list of the best materials from the external websites. One of the side effects of such lists is that you will likely get backlinks from these sites.
• Pitch the latest book that’s relevant to your audience.
• Recycle some of your successful old posts and make the infographics out of them. All of us enjoy the capacious and accessible information in the form of the images. I find Canva very useful for such kind of work.

• Share the list of names and contacts (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) of the real sharks of your field for following. Try to mention not only the influencers known by everyone but some less public guys you must obviously know. Think about making thematic collections, for example, by countries, as Search Engine Journal once did.

• How often do you glance at the calendar? There’re plenty of holidays every day in the world, dedicate your post to one of them. TimeAndDate contains all the information you ever need.

• I’m quite sure you have some articles that you consider to be awesome, but, unfortunately, they didn’t rock. 100% that happened because of the non-catching heading. A heading is one of the main success factors, I know it for sure, as when I started to pay lots of attention to the process of naming my articles, the percentage of people who read them increased about 35%. So make a small rewrite of that material, think well about the perfect heading and publish it. I suggest you learning the material by HubSpot on how to create catchy headings.

• Describe the history of the industry you’re working at. Write how it was established and how it was transformed to the present day. What a blessing that those days when you would have to read tons of material in the library for the sake of such an article have already passed. :)

• Use Search Questions. This Serpstat feature allows seeing user’s queries related to the keywords you are interested in exactly in the form they type it in Google search bar. So, it gives you not only tons of inspiration, but also the understanding of the most pressing users’ questions.

• Create the list of tools you’re using every day to simplify work or whatever. Pay attention that many tools suggest referral programs or different bonuses to their promoters.
• If you already have such list, take your favorite tool and review it. Again, you can write its creator, and your effort will likely be rewarded. We in Serpstat quite often receive messages from bloggers who have written or want to write a review about us, and we always encourage them with free temporary subscriptions.
• Do not minimize the importance of knowing simple skills. Do you know the easiest way to create a gif, to draw arrows on the eyes, or some lifehacks of using Google? Write about it, many people will be grateful. For example, just this month more than 5000 asked Google how to create a gif file, feel free to catch the part of this traffic.

• By the way, about Google. While creating the material concerning the content ideas, it’s impossible not to mention Google Trends. Except checking and comparing the brand’s health, it’s a good place to look for the inspiration. You can see what queries related to the topic you’re interested in is currently trending in the region you select. For example, here’re the results for the ‘cars’ topic and USA.

• When you’re running out of inspiration, and no tips seem helpful, just don’t worry. Relax and chill, switch your mind to some entirely different thing. Brilliant ideas always come when you expect the least.