How to never run out of content ideas for your blog
Three tips to never run out of content ideas for your blog.
If you want Content Marketing to work for your website, then you will need content ideas that are relevant and valuable for your target audience. However, getting a content calendar going is easier said than done.
The challenge that even best marketers face is to create relevant and user friendly content topics. This is a bigger problem since we live in the information age where sharing content and content creation has become a differentiating factor for brands.
You may find it harder to plan a content calendar if you work in a niche industry like pharmaceuticals, banking or insurance.
So, how does one get started to understand the best strategies to plan a content calendar?
We share three tips with you to keep your content exclusive, fresh and relevant.
1.) Start with a content list
It may seem terribly obvious that you should start with making a list of content ideas. But, we are not just talking about a simple list – we are talking about a purposeful content list that covers a daily plan.
To start making a list of potential topics, first start with creating a list of the search terms or topics that your buyer persona is likely to look for. That should be your first list.
Cultivating a habit of jotting down thoughts as part of a daily routine helps to capture elusive yet ingenious ideas that may be quickly lost in memory. So when a fantastic idea strikes, be ready to get it down. Keep a notebook handy, or go digital with in-phone notepads or specialised apps like Wunderlist.
Second, expand on the list of the keywords or key terms to form a plan that includes more content angles. Psychologists claim that list-making helps to increase productivity and creativity by enabling people to categorise and prioritise information, making way for clearer, more purpose-driven thinking.
This content list has to be a living-breathing document that is constantly updated. To update the list, you should aim to use feedback from your sales teams to see which key terms they use to sell.
2.) Read other people’s content
Sourcing new ideas doesn’t only revolve around ourselves. If your creativity has hit a dead end, referring to content ideas from other publishers or even competitors will help you kickstart those thinking juices again. Often times, we learn, get inspired and build upon other people’s content to create new works that are uniquely ours.
Regularly keeping up to date with news, going through various related outlets or even taking the old-school route reading books are ways that can help you brainstorm new content. Curation tools like Pinterest, Flipboard and Curata are useful in sparking inspiration, with feeds constantly updated based on personal preferences or set filters that may show trending content. The world is truly at your feet to put your spin on.
3.) Learn from market trends
The best stories often stem from analysing the data and market trends in your industry segment. Often, we can create a new piece of content by looking at unrelated data trends.
It might sound like a game to pass the time, but you can take two perfectly unrelated concepts and connect them in a coherent and meaningful manner to explore new angles to refresh your content topic. Although unintended, deriving a nonsensical, yet catching sounding title from this also helps to pique the interest of viewers.
Not only does creating seemingly far fetched storylines stretch our cognitive reasoning skill, doing so will provide endless combinations in spicing up a subject that has been regularly covered. It also enables content to reach out to a two sets of audiences, readers whom might be interested in either one of the topics covered. An excellent example of this method in application is HubSpot’s piece on ‘Marketing Lessons From the Cupcake’.
Written by: (www.script.com.sg)
Edited & Illustrated by: Script Consultants Pte Ltd
Copywriting and Content Marketing Agency 