It’s been said over and over again that one of the keys to success with content marketing is volume. If you’re not posting enough, then you’re not making a lasting impression on your target audience. Out of sight, out of mind.
But it’s also important to make sure your posts have not just quantity, but quality. Posting a blog every day has little effect if no one cares enough to come back tomorrow. For success in content marketing, you need to be constantly generating interesting and original posts in one form or another. So how do you do it? How do you keep up that level of both visibility and desirability over time? What happens when you run out of ideas?
Relax. The Internet is a vast, virtually inexhaustible resource. When in doubt, there are plenty of places you can go to get new, relevant topics to build blogs, videos, podcasts and other content out of. Here are a few great places to get content marketing ideas.
- Soovle.com. One of the most important sources for new content topics is finding out what people are searching for in your field. Many sites will show you a list of popular searches on that site for a particular topic. But Soovle provides popular search suggestions based on keywords for all the major websites: Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo and Amazon, as well as Wikipedia and Answers.com. So for instance, if you type in “remodeling,” you might find that “remodeling kitchen” is popular on Google, while “remodeling bathroom” is popular on YouTube. So now you instantly have two different forms of content you can create: a blog post about kitchen remodeling, and a video about bathroom remodeling.
- LinkedIn Groups. LinkedIn is a great professional resource for any number of different needs. But the groups in particular are a goldmine for content material. There are all different groups for all different industries and interests. Look at the ones that relate to your brand. Whereas with Soovle, you can see what people are searching for, with LinkedIn you can get a real idea of what people are talking about. What are the prominent news stories in your field? What are people saying about them? What questions are people asking? These are the things that are interest your target audience, and the things that will make great content.
- Social Media. If you want to know what your target audience is interested in, what better way to find out than to go to them directly? Look at the comments and posts on your Facebook page, the tweets people send you… Then create white papers to help them solve their problems. Make videos that address the things that concern them. Even take some of their questions and compile them into an FAQ.
- Other Blogs and Content. Look around to see what other content creators are doing with their content. What information are they providing? What topics are they covering? Take the parts you like and turn them into content for your site. Be careful, though. ALWAYS give credit where it’s due. When you take ideas or information from another source, always link back to where you found it. Otherwise, it’s plagiarism. Plus, if you link back to their site, they might do the same for you down the line.
Ideas are literally everywhere. There’s no shortage of them. You just need to know where and how to look. By keeping your eyes and ears open, you can find enough content to feed your site for years.
