Ten Super Helpful Ways to Generate Content Ideas
Content is King! Creating new topics might not be easy. Keep reading this article to find a great way of making topic ideas for your blogs posts.
Practice shows that great content ideas do not come easy. Often it might be a "writer's block" or tons of other issues.
Anyway, if you don't know how to solve this issue, you won't be able to produce content regularly. Even if you are a skillful content creator who has hundreds of publications in your portfolio.
How to help yourself in this situation?
In this post, you will find out ten actionable tips to help you generate content ideas.
Let's start!
1. Find Topics with SEO Potential
On one hand, you can review your competitors' blogs and enrich your content ideas arsenal with their topics. On the other hand, it will be difficult to rank covering these topics. Besides, it won't guarantee any search traffic in return.
There is likely a way to find unique topic ideas and generate tons of traffic.
You should use a tool from Ahrefs called Content Explorer. And here is an example of how to use it in this case.
For instance, you want to write a piece of content that would cover information about content design. One of your niche-related search queries is "infographic." Type this search term in the search bar of the tool and apply the following filters:
- Page traffic from 1K
- Referring domains up to 5
- Domain Rating up to 20
Finally, skim through the list of the suggested topics and choose the most promising ones.
These topics drive a good portion of organic traffic and are less competitive in terms of rankings.
By using this strategy, you will be able to cover tricky topics that revolve around specific search terms, like pamphlet design, pert charts, etc.
2. Use the Headline Frameworks
One of the easiest ways to start with an excellent topic idea is using the headline frameworks.
Let's say you want to write a post about digital marketing. But you have no idea what topic to cover. YouTube can help you a lot in this case.
How does it work?
Go to YouTube and find one of the channels that highlight video content related to the niche in question.
For example, Neil Patel is a well-known digital marketing guru. If you visit his YouTube channel, you will see tons of digital marketing topics that you can use by yourself.
Grab a few topics and modify them slightly. For example:
- Video "How to Convert Your Leads Into Sales With These 5 CRM Features" modify into "5 CRM Features That Will Help You Convert Leads Into Sales"
- Video "8 Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic FAST and FOR FREE" modify into "How to Increase a Website Traffic for Free: 8 Ways That Will Help You"
This technique is simple and actionable. Don't hesitate to use it.
3. Your Customer Success Team can Give you Some Ideas
How often do you talk to your customer success team?
If you do it rarely then you should start doing it more often.
Your customer success team works with your customers and prospects every day. Each customer success team member knows what your customers want from your service. Plus, people may share some pain points you should pay attention to.
Run a few interviews with your customer success team. Prepare a list of questions that you want to ask. Afterward, collect the answers and analyze them. Figure out potential keywords that you can use in your upcoming content.
This procedure will help you kill two birds with one stone - you cover a topic in demand and get a chance to rank for niche-related keywords.
4. Explore "People Also Ask" Results
Whenever you type a query on Google, you can see a "People Also Ask" box. This section provides answers to questions related to your search request.
For example, if you search for "writer's block", you will see "People Also Ask" question suggestions.
You can use these questions for your topic ideas. However, PAA results don't show the stats of how many people search for these questions on Google. Thus, if your goal is to create content that would help you rank in the SERP, you will need this data.
How to find this information?
Keywords Explorer will provide you with the statistics. Just type your search inquiry and go to the "Matching terms'' report. Then, click the "Questions" tab and see the results.
As you can see, this list of potential topic ideas illustrates such useful SEO stats as search volume and keyword difficulty. Search volume shows how many people search for this search request monthly. Keyword difficulty gives an estimation of how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a keyword on a 100-point scale.
Take this information into account and choose the most promising topic ideas.
5. Explore your Competitors' Paid Keywords
If you don't want to be out of pocket with choosing the right keywords, you should explore your competitors' paid keywords. Remember, your competitors won't invest their money into keywords that don't drive conversions.
How to figure out competitors' paid keywords?
Site Explorer tool will help with this task. Insert your competitor's site URL and review the "Paid Keywords" report.
Review the suggested keywords and decide for yourself which ones to take on board for your content marketing strategy.
6. Run a Competitors Analysis
You are probably aware of customers’ buying decisions. They compare one product with similar ones in the market. Then they make a decision.
Your competitors can apply the strategy that is based on creating content that compares main products within the niche. In other words, they write posts like "Product A vs. Product B" or "Brand A alternatives."
Hence, you should create the same type of content as well. It will help you rank for the keywords you might not rank before. Plus, it gives you a wonderful opportunity to present your brand in the limelight.
First of all, you will have to research your main competitors and keyword search requests that people use to get the information they need.
Take your brand name and paste it into Keywords Explorer. Use filters adding "vs" and "alternatives" words. Then, select "any" and you will get the list of necessary keywords.
7. Review your Competitors' Top-Ranking Content
By analyzing your competitors' content you will see that they already have particular blog posts that rank in the SERP. It happens due to using SEO techniques. As a rule, these top-ranking pages cover quite popular topics that drive tons of traffic.
Your goal is to figure out these top pages. But how to do this?
Again, go to the Site Explorer tool and review the "Top pages" report.
You can see topics that drive traffic insanely.
8. Play with a Content Idea Generator
If the above-mentioned tips don't work and you still experience a lack of topic ideas, don't shy away from using a free content idea generator from Hubspot.
The tool suggests up to 5 different topic ideas to choose from. You can unlock 250 topic ideas by creating an account.
9. Use Pain Points your Product Solves as the Source of Topic Ideas
When your product can solve a number of different issues with the help of its toolkit, it might be a good source of generating topic ideas.
What does it mean?
For example, you have an SEO product that has a wide range of SEO tools. These tools solve different SEO tasks - keyword research, site audit, backlink analysis, and so on.
Take these options into consideration and create content. Let's say, write a blog post that covers all the hidden pitfalls of a site audit process.
10. Work on Updating Outdated Content
The truth is that even old-fashioned topics can work better compared to new ones. But for this, the outdated topics should be updated. Run through the content, update the figures and data, add visuals like infographics, photos, or videos and you are all done!
First things first, you need to figure out blog posts that performed well but have lost their positions in driving traffic. You can do this by reviewing the "Top pages" report that is available in the Site Explorer tool.
You need to set a comparison date range to the past 3-6 months and filter the results by the most traffic loss.
Now, you see the blog posts with the traffic drop. Review them and decide what topics are worth being updated.
To Sum up
Yes, generating topic ideas isn't easy peasy. Especially, when you create content on a daily basis. Your brain can't work tirelessly every single day.
By applying these ten ways of generating content ideas, you will be able to create outstanding content constantly.
If you think this post lacks more tips, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.