3 Inexhaustible Sources of Fresh Ideas For Your Content & 21 Ideas For Fast Posts
This is a guest post by Serpstat‘s Eleonora Zolotaryova.
Content Marketing has become something no online business owner can ignore. Today, everyone knows that spreading content is a crucial aspect to marketing strategy. So, everybody creates blogs, actively updates social networks, and delivers content to audiences by any possible means. All this hot activity requires a lot of energy and inspiration, which sometimes can be difficult for all of us to achieve.
In this article, I will tell you how to come up with new content ideas even when the inspiration isn’t there.
Where to get new ideas
You could turn some usually ordinary things into a unique angle. Look at these 3 sources of thousands of new ideas, you might not have thought of before.
1. Google Trends
This great tool allows you to track the dynamics of search queries, trends gaining popularity, and make certain forecasts for the future. And of course, it may give tons of inspiration for content marketers.
Here you can choose the topic you’re interested in (e.g. cars), select the region, and see what queries relating to this topic are trending at the moment. In other words, where people’s current interests lie. Below you see the results for the ‘cars’ topic relating to USA.
2. Quora
Quora, with its audience in the millions, is an excellent source of new ideas. People use it to find out the answers to the most pressing questions. If you’re patient enough to read and analyse, you could find dozens of new ideas. For example, if you’re running a travel blog, such a question as you see below may give you a new idea for an article.
And you know that on Quora you can find things related to any topic.
3. Calendar
I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this, but yes, a calendar may become the source of some great content ideas. There are so many different holidays and memorable days in different countries and different cultures, some may turn out to be great news-makers.
I use the TimeAndDate website, there’re lots of useful features, and the calendar of all possible holidays in the world is among them.
21 Fast Ideas
Urgently need new content and haven’t got a lot of time? Time-management may be a hard thing, but let me help you a bit with these ready-made ideas. Save them for the future and use this list when you need to create material quickly.
- Guest-post: There is an enormous number of authors on the web. Just contact someone you like and suggest they become a contributor on your website. I’m sure that many writers will agree, as at least that will also be kind of promo for them.
- ‘Pros and Cons’ article: This subject is boundless. For example, if you’re selling a photo editor tool, write about the advantages and disadvantages of black and white photographing.
- Get your audience acquainted with you and your colleagues: People enjoy knowing that there are real people behind every website/company/tool etc. For example, you can post information about any of your employees with a certain periodical.
- Show your office life in general: Not only how you work, but also how you’re having a rest, etc. Inspire your audience with your team spirit.
- Some things may seem obvious to you, but not to someone else: For example, while writing this article, I was looking for how to capture a desktop video. If you know some easy lifehack, or just anything useful someone may be interested in, don’t hesitate – write about it! But of course, it’s desirable to match at least a little to your website’s main topic.
- Collections of your most popular past materials: You can divide it by topic (“Most readable articles concerning SEO”), by time (“The best articles of 2017/March/Week”), by the author, by popularity or whatever.
- Collections from other sites: What’s more, you can create the list with the best materials of the week/month/year from some other websites.
- Create the list of your favourite tools: Like “Tools I’m using while creating this article” or “My favourite educational tools” etc.
- Review tools: Have you recently created such a list? Fine, take any tool from the list and do its full review. By the way, you can contact that company and ask for a special discount for your readers or some benefits for your own.
- Create a list of people to follow: Some influencers of your niche, their blogs, social networks, etc.
- Describe a case study from your experience: Or from your friends’ experience. Write about some failures or successes; your audience will be glad to explore such topics.
- Conduct an interview: Talk with an influencer from your niche, or just with one of your key employees.
- Events from the past: Is there a big event soon? Create the “While we are waiting for the big event, let’s remember our past big event” post.
- Entertain your readers: Post some jokes related to the niche you’re working in. But please, make sure it’s REALLY funny.
- Create a quiz: Everybody loves quizzes, they’re great traffic generators. Use platforms like Qzzr to create ones for your website. These quizzes may be educational or entertaining, or both.
- Surveys: Create a poll or survey of your audience.
- Re-write some old posts: Is it cheating? Maybe. But just in case, let me remind you that if you take an article from December 2016 and combine it with an article from July 2016 and February 2017, then you could get great and entirely new material. Just present everything from a slightly different angle. And do not forget to change the words in the sentences, Google dislikes copied text.
- Make the infographics: All of us enjoy learning material from images. So you can take any of your successful already-published material and recycle it in the form of infographics. It’s guaranteed your audience will like it. I think Canva is the best tool for doing this.
- Explain the terminology related to the niche in which you work: Create a special dictionary and explain to your audience some certain words from time to time. For example, if you are doing SEO, explain what is bread crumbs, white-hat, technical audit of the website and so on.
- Review informative material: Or you can educate your audience in another way: to review some recent book related to the field where you work.
- Create an FAQ Post: Respond to the most frequent questions that customers ask you.
Looking for more creative content to let you churn some ideas out? Need a hand getting a creative campaign up & in-motion? Then don’t hesitate to get in touch or introduce yourself on our LinkedIn!
