Imagine how productive and stress-free every Monday would be if you didn’t have to spend time coming up with something to write.
Well, guess what?
You can have that too. For real.
Just follow these 5 simple tips to conveniently bid goodbye to stressing out when you have to come up with new ideas that your audience loves.
After all, it’s every content marketer’s wish to never run out of subjects to write, isn’t it?
Content Marketing Ideas Index
- Ask your customers questions, and answer it
- Search for secondary sources of questions
- Browse your Competitors’ Website
- Update content that has performed well
- Tell Your Story
- Create a guide
#1 Ask your customers questions. Answer it
If you have a social media following then the easiest way to come up with content ideas is to ask your audience what they want and look at your comment section.
Here’s a brief account of how a pool company recovered from a massive setback by just answering the right questions.
Marcus Sheridan’s pool company, River Pools and Spas, got only two orders a month as opposed to the six orders they got on average. Two customers even withdrew their $50,000 deposits. Their company was in big trouble.
Marcus turned all of this around by simply writing blog posts that answered specific queries. He even wrote an article on the best pool companies (his competitors) to drive traffic to his website from his competitors’ keywords. Cool, no?
So how do you ask questions?
Assume that as a pool repair and remodelling specialist, you are interested in asking questions of your customers.
You can ask you customers questions through a survey, in social media, via your sales folks, or on the phone. Primary research of your audience has been tackled in a previous article: How to research users easily to create compelling communications.
If you already have a customer base, talk to your sales teams or customers, to learn what kind of questions they have on your product. Again, create content that answers their queries.
Lastly, listen to others in your industry to come up with great content ideas and start typing away.
#2 Search for secondary sources of questions, customer problems
The trick in secondary research is to know in advance the type of questions customer ask in your category and prepare FAQs and Blogs that answer these questions.
There are several techniques for doing this that we have outlined below.
Search for and join Facebook Groups where customers ask questions.
- Social Media: Facebook Groups, Twitter Chats
- Q&A sites: Quora.com, answers.com, Yahoo Q&A, Reddit, AskJeeves, Askalo [See an entire list of Q&A websites here]
- Reviews Sites: Better Business Bureau, Yelp, Consumer Affairs, Google Reviews, Facebook Reviews
- Websites: Competitor FAQs, Knowledge Base, Blogs
- Comments: DisQus
Search Google to find FB Groups of interest. Search Twitter chats, and Q&A
forums like Quora.
Ask and search for questions related to your industry and create content that answers those questions. Check questions being asked at www.alsoasked.com
You can also find pertinent questions on AnswerThePublic.com
#3 Browse your Competitors’ Website
Why waste time mining for ideas when somebody has already done it?
“Sure but their content is wayyyyy better”, you say.
Explore the blogs of your competition for ideas. The blog from RedoYourPool.com, a pool remodeling company based in Phoenix, is a great example of content.
Well, you just have to make it better. For example, your competitor has recently posted an article on “10 Strategies To Keep Your Pool Sparkling for Years”.
You can post an article that lists 10 Pool Strategies that’ll sparkle in 2020. Finish with detailed infographics and videos.
Wait, don’t stop there. Use Google’s auto suggest feature to come up with more topics for your blogs. Other search engines like YouTube and Pinterest also help you come up with relevant topics.
Check out Google’s Autosuggest feature in the search bar, as well as the bottom of the
Bonus Tip: Sign Up to your competitor’s newsletter to see what topics they cover in their mails.
#4 Update content that has performed well
There’s a high chance that most of your traffic comes from a handful of blog posts.
If you scan your Google Analytics data for your blog posts, you will understand which posts are at the top.
Utilize these blog posts and add content to them based on
- Comments posted on social media.
- Latest updates and news
- Reader’s feedback.
Subscribe to Google Alerts. Use tools like a Feed reader to build a list of feeds. Alternatively, you could use social aggregators such as scoop.it, or Paper.li to create a collection of news from related topics.
Head over to feedreader.com, login with your social creds, and put you list of favourite RSS Feeds in there.
Once you’ve added new content, repurpose the blog post into videos, social media posts, and podcasts.
#5 Tell Your Story
Sometimes, you have to dig through a whole bunch of stories and personal experiences to come up with valuable content.
If you have an authentic story that goes along with the topic you’re about to post, go ahead and tell it.
Everybody loves stories, especially the ones that highlight your struggles and pain.
For eg Alex Turnbull and his team from Grove made a successful blog post on how they grew their company’s revenue to six-figures.
“Yeah but I don’t really have any story to tell.”
But you do.
For eg if you’ve been running a small business, you can put together a blog post that outlines your journey so far.
If you’re still feeling blocked, then ask yourself a few simple questions like
- What’s one thing I’d do differently if I started again?
- What mistakes can beginners in your industry avoid?
- What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learnt so far?
Creating posts that answer questions like these can be of great help to others in your industry.
#6 Create a guide
How do you create a blog post that makes your readers click 15 other posts?
By grouping together similar posts that provide value when read in a sequence. This way, you can create a mini-guide on a particular topic.
Take a look at how the Content Marketing Institute has put together a mini content marketing guide for newbies.
They’ve provided an introduction, a few descriptions and a ton of links to other blog posts and PDFs that’ll keep readers clicking for more. You can do the same too!
There you go! 5 simple tips that’ll turn you into a perpetual content machine.
To sum it up, what should you do to never run out of content ideas?
- Ask your audience what they’d like to see next
- Explore secondary sources from where you can pick up questions that customers put into Google. Make a lost of these and answer it. Take a look at the comments on your social media posts. Go to forums and Q&A websites like Quora and create posts based on the questions asked.
- Listen to what others in your industry are saying. Skim through their comment section to find valuable topics.
- If you find a relevant topic on your competitor’s site that you haven’t covered yet, write an article and make it better than your competitor’s.
- Use the auto suggest feature of search engines to discover related content topics.
- Sign up to your competitor’s newsletter and steal some ideas from their mails
- Tell an authentic story that highlights your struggles and how you overcame them.
- Update and repurpose content that has performed well
- Create a guide with an introduction, brief description, and plenty of links.
How did you like this blog post?
Are there any extra techniques that you use to keep pumping out content?
Let us know in the comments below. Also, don’t forget to share this blog post with your friends and co-workers if you found it useful.
Coming up with great content continuously and consistently is a Herculean Task.
If you’re busy running a business, you won’t have the time to sit down and research content ideas in your niche.
That’s when you should enlist the help of Pigtail Pundits. We’ve been helping companies, in the B2B space, to get more leads for more than 23 years. We’d be more than happy to help you generate leads for your business. Schedule a FREE call today.