Generate Infinite Ideas for Your Blog
The hardest part about content strategy is the ability to consistently create the content.
Depending on who you are, this can range from incredibly easy to nearly impossible. I generally fall on one end of the spectrum depending on my mood.
When you are in a slump and want to bang your head against the wall, this article should help you generate new ideas to help you kickstart your content making.
1 — Google Trends
I love Google Trends. I do a lot of research on Google trends. It is a great way to see what topics are trending today or in general.
When looking for relevant things to write about I first start by seeing what is trending for the day. I generally find that content which combines relevant content with educational content always performs the best.
So, if you can talk about “What Oprah Winfrey’s Speak Can Teach You About Self-Discipline,” or “The Nick Saban Playbook to Sales,” then you will have yourself some amazing and spreadable content.
If you still cannot get something from the top list, then I move on to start searching Google trends for relevant topics.
If I was working in construction, I would just search, “construction”.
I always spend some time messing around with the trend timescale. For the picture above, this is for the last 30 days. I see the portal bridge construction search term has increased by 800% in the last 30 days. If I see something on this list then I will go explore what is going on. If you do not know what is going on in your industry then their is probably a high chance that other do not as well.
If this does not lead to better results, then I will continue to get more specific in my search criteria. After spending a several minutes looking through trends and search results, I will generate some creative fluid for an article that would be worth writing about.
Additionally, Google Trends is a great resource for any content making strategy. Including data and graphs in your content help to provide relevant and engaging information even if the information is just for fun.
2 — Quora
Quara is an amazing tool for finding out what people are asking for. I talked here about how I use it for a distribution channel of our content. However, you can also use Quora to help find the questions that people are asking for.
For people who do not know what it is, Quora is basically modern and greatly improved Yahoo answers.
Now when I get to Quora, the first thing that I do is start researching what people are asking about. To continue with are construction example I went to their search bar and asked, “Why do construction workers…” and it gave me other top results that people are already asking.
Depending on what you discover, this may be enough. If you own an commerce store that sells products to construction workers, then you have found a great idea for the type of things people are already looking for and also a great place to post your content too.
Now I navigate to the already written answers. This is a great place to already see what other people are saying. The first thing that I notice when I go see the answers is the quality of the answers. I find that longer Quora posts that give pictures, details, and stats are the ones that always perform better.
As we can see here there are only two answers, and both of them are not very well thought out. Even if the answers are well thought out, I generally think that you can make better content, provide more details, a different angle, or be all around original.
The next thing I start to notice is the number of times these answers have been seen. 225 views may seem like a low answer, but this could be your perfect demographic of people who are looking at your content.
The people who come from Quora are generally more of a target demographic then have shown that they convert better than other traffic resources. If you want to learn more about how to write a great Quora pst check out thisarticle.
3 — Twitter
When people think of social media they often are thinking about Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. However, the often neglected Twitter is still one of the best places to engage with people.
Unlike other platforms, Twitter allows anyone to interact with whoever they’d like. This is a great opportunity to to only find things that people are looking for, but also have someone to send your content to. If you want to you can even include their name in the article. This is fun and helps build your audience once member at a time.
Once you login to Twitter go to the search bar and enter whatever area that you are involved in. For me I typed in “making content”.
Right away I begin to see what people are talking about with this.
I like these kinds of posts. They have high engagement and Kingsley is already a content maker himself. One time I actually saw comments like this and decided to write this article about building an email list.
I do not know if you have began to notice, but the best part of using these channels is that you find places where you can engage audiences with your content once you make it. Making content is only half the battle.
If you are still not finding anything, then I will go into the dark section of Twitter, the comments section. The comments section is normally where all the trolls live so be careful not to get caught in something that does not help your brand.
I actually pulled this comment because it gave me the idea of writing an article about not writing clickbait headlines. If you do not know, never use clickbait. Clickbait provides short term gains for long term brand destruction. The only type of content you want to make is one that has your viewers interest in mind.
If I decided to make an article about not having clickbait, I would tweet to Simon to see what he thinks about the article. Obviously this tweet thread has a lot of action about the use of clickbait and how it ruined the original YouTubers.
4 — HubSpot Blog Idea Generator
Most people probably do not know what HubSpot was originally a sales software, but they have been branching out into inbound marketing.
The have a great free certification program for in-bound marketing that I recommend other people try out.
As they expand their inbound marketing program and services, they understand the idea of providing huge value to users. They made this software that helps people generate new ideas based on nouns that you insert.
In my example I put in the noun t-shirt and I got a “week’s worth of blog topics”.
Now this is not that bad huh? I like some of the titles that it produced and I often steal not the ideas here, but the headlines. Titles like “The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on Tshirts” may not work for a t-shirt manufacturer, but would work great for The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on Instagram Marketing would work great for me.
Hubspot also has a ton of other great inbound marketing tools that can be leveraged to help your blog, social media, SEO, or now ad placements.
5 — Answer The Public
Most people probably have never heard about Answer The Public. It is a hidden gem in the marketing world and one that provides huge help in finding the underlying meaning to why people are searching the things they are searching for.
I also love this guy that they have on the homepage. However, the point is also to use the search field. In this case I just searched “dresses.
The search results for dress returns 195 results. Which can initially be seen as an awesome, but hard to read infographic. Where it shows visualization I will hit the button to switch it over to the data display.
This provides great content that people are already trying to find answers for. A lot of the results come in ready to write formats too.
Can dresses be dyed
Can cocktail dresses be long
Where to buy dresses online
These are great options for blog posts that will likely generate positive results for your audience. However, we are not even done yet!
We are only in one section of the results, the questions sections. If we scroll down to the prepositions we will see even more results.
From this list you can generate even more ideas.
What dresses to wear to a Christmas wedding
Dresses to wear with high knee boots
Dresses to wear to a Christening
These are all awesome topics that would have been hard to come up by yourself, but will help to keep your blog content arsenal full with original content.
Conclusion
All of these websites provide relevant and trending topics, but no matter what topic you write about, the two keys are still to deliver a ton of value to your reader as well as find the appropriate places to distribute your content.
