A blog is a key tool for content marketing success. You need a blog that consistently produces high-quality content.
Not knowing what to write can be a real struggle when it comes to blogging.
finding topics that will both fill an editorial calendar and engage readers can be difficult. It is important to make sure that the topics chosen capture the attention of the target audience and keep them coming back for more.
It’s great to be inspired when you’re creating content, but if you’re doing it strategically, you need to be just as strategic when you’re coming up with ideas.
There should be a process for coming up with ideas for articles just as there is a process for writing, editing, publishing, and promoting content. When you have finished, you will have a blog content schedule that will never run out.
Ways to Consistently Come Up With Article Ideas
To come up with content ideas that will be valuable to your audience and have a high potential for ranking, follow the steps below.
1. Have a Clear Understanding of Your Audience
You need to think about who you are writing for before you start considering what to write.
You should begin by understanding their basic demographic information, such as their age, sex, where they live, their education, and their professional background. After determining what your audience’s interests and challenges are, you can begin to cater your content to them.
By thinking about how your product or service can align with your audience’s interests and solve their challenges, you should be able to come up with ideas for blog posts.
Once you know who your target audience is, you can research where they spend their time online so you can reach them more effectively. You can read what they’re talking about, what’s trending among them, and the causes and issues they’re concerned with.
You will also gain an in-depth knowledge of the leaders in your industry, such as the influencers they follow. You can talk to these people to learn more about what your target market is interested in or invite them for an interview.
When you ask your audience for blog ideas, you’ll get a goldmine of ideas that you know they’ll want to read because they came from people they respect and follow.
You can be even more direct about asking for input from your audience once you know who they are. Call or survey them to get their opinion. You will be able to tell if the topics you plan on writing about are interesting to your audience if you get feedback like that.
2. Do a Brain Dump
Now that you understand who your audience is, it’s time to write down the ideas that come to you instinctively.
This is theNotecard step. Here, you’ll take your ideas and make them into actual article ideas by turning them into Notecards. The objective is to jot down as many ideas as possible.
Keep a pen and paper or note taking app close by so you can write down ideas when you have them. If you would prefer, you can set up a brainstorming session for either yourself or with your colleagues.
It is beneficial to have brainstorming sessions with your customer support or sales teams in addition to marketing teams because they usually have a better understanding of what your market needs during different stages of the customer journey.
Look around for ideas. Type a topic into the Google search bar and make a note of the autosuggestions.
The following search phrases will tell you what readers are searching for and are likely good keywords to target for SEO.
Article ideas can come from the most surprising places. Zyro has an FAQs section on their website where they discuss in greater detail topics from their knowledge base as blog posts or articles.
3. Rank Your Topic Ideas
There are many things to write about and brainstorming will give you more ideas than you have time for.
You’ll want to focus on quality over quantity when creating successful blog posts.
You’ll be discarding most of your ideas from the brain dump and instead focusing on the ones that are worth pursuing. A three-point scoring system could help you to determine which ideas are worth pursuing, which ones to save for later, and which ones aren’t worth bothering with.
The thing I like best about my job is the people I work with. The people I work with: 3
Rank the topics you think are worth writing about from most pressing to least pressing for your target market.
We will investigate your most important topics in more detail, but at this stage – depending on how often you publish – you probably have enough content to write about for the next month or two just using this method.
4. Conduct Keyword Research Around Your Top 3 Topics
You can use SEO tools, like Ahrefs or SEMRush, if you want to be more specific about what topics you want to write about. These tools allow you to see what evergreen content is already present on the internet.
With the help of these tools, you will be able to find blog ideas that are already successful. You can use these ideas to create original content for your blog that is tailored to your niche, service, or product.
Use Google’s Keyword Planner to see related searches for your topic that have been conducted recently.
If you want to see what people are saying about your topic on Twitter, you can do a search for your topic and see what people are tweeting about it.
Research online communities related to your target market to see if there is a demand for more information on a particular topic. Is there anything you can clear up about your topic on Quora through a blog post? What about Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn groups?
When you complete this step, you will have generated a list of blog post ideas that you know people are already searching for or asking about.
5. Perform a Content Gap Analysis
Looking for potential content ideas by seeing what has been said about the topics you want to write about elsewhere online will help you identify possible gaps you can fill.
You can create content to fill the gaps in what your competitors produce.
Browse your competitor’s content to see what they have written about your topic. How did they write about your topic? What did they miss? If you were to do the task yourself, how could you improve upon it?
This is a technique where you improve upon existing popular content by coming up with something much better.
BuzzSumo is an audit tool that allows users to see how well their competitor’s content is performing on social media and how many backlinks it has generated.
When you are able to see all of the content that your competitor has published about the topic you want to write about, you will be able to see where you could fill in the gaps with your own content.
Look at comments left on blog posts to see if readers want more information on a certain topic, or if they think something was left out.
If you can fill in the content gaps in what your competitor is offering, you will have an advantage because you will be providing something that the market is interested in learning more about.
6. Learn from your industry peers
The third strategy is to learn from your industry peers.
To see what is working for your industry’s top pages, look at what they are doing. If you and another company share a target audience, the same marketing methods that worked for the other company are likely to work for you as well.
It’ll be great to go beyond just your competitors. Is there another company that you look up to that you can learn from? Possibly because they occupy the same space but are not your direct competitor. Or perhaps their way of marketing resonates with you.
7. Ask your audience
The next strategy is to ask your audience. One way to engage your social media followers is to post questions or polls on your profile. can be changed to “What topics would you like us to share content about?” What content do you want to see us sharing? can be changed to What topics would you like us to share content about?
If you would like replies that are more open-ended, posting a question will be great. If you want to find out what your audience might be interested in, you can create a poll with a few different options.
We posed a question to our followers on Twitter about the type of content they would like to see from us in the future.
8. Use a research tool
The eighth strategy is to use a content research tool to find popular topics.
Buzzsumo is like Google for the most shared content. Buzzsumo is a search engine that allows users to find the most popular content on the internet relating to any given keyword.
Search for a keyword related to your business on Google and take a look at the results that come up. Try to identify any popular topics related to that keyword and consider whether or not they could be useful for your business.
The results from Buzzsumo can be sorted by social network. For example, you could see what types of articles are popular on Twitter. Press the “Twitter Shares” button to see a list of articles sorted by the number of Twitter shares.
Here’s a tip for finding content to share on social media: Check out the blog posts and articles that are being shared by the influencers in your industry. An article that has been successful on Twitter in general would likely be of interest to your audience, as long as it is relevant to them.
9. Experiment with Jobs To Be Done
In addition to creating personas, you could also try the Jobs to Be Done methodology.
Jobs to Be Done is a concept created by Harvard Business School professor, Clayton M. Christensen, and his team.
It is more beneficial for us to create and sell products that coincide with the jobs our customers want to do or the reasons they buy products, rather than basing them off of demographic information alone.
What does this mean for creating content that your audience loves?
You can better serve your customers by understanding the jobs they want to do and creating content to help them with those jobs.
We have been creating content that helps our readers with their social media strategy, content creation, engagement, and more. For example, we recently published an article on how to improve your Facebook engagement. People seemed to like the blog posts.
10. Create marketing personas
The tenth strategy is to create marketing personas. Your marketing personas can help guide your social media content strategy by providing insights into what kinds of content will resonate with your target audience.
Here are a few ways to research on your favorite companies:
On Facebook, you could use Pages to Watch. This feature allows you to compare your Page’s performance to similar Pages. You can also view the top posts of any page for the week by clicking on the page. For instance, here’s a recent top post from Shopify:
The “Pages to Watch” feature can be found in your Page Insights, at the bottom of your Overview tab. This feature is only available to Pages with more than 100 Likes.
You can create a Twitter list of companies you want to learn from and stay up to date on what they share by following them on Twitter.
Here’s how to create a Twitter list:
- Click on your profile photo and select “List”
- Click on “Create a list” and fill out the fields (You might want to keep this list private)
- Hit “Save list”
To add companies to your list, go to the company’s profile and click on the three dots. Select “Add or remove from lists…” to add the company to your list.
After you have completed your research and created your marketing personas, you will have a better understanding of your audience’s goals and objectives, as well as the type of content they are interested in reading.
11. Follow trends
The last strategy is to be aware of any new trends in social media and follow them. This will give you an idea of the kind of content you should post. It can still be helpful to have a general idea, even if it’s not tailored to your audience.
For example, the top content format now is video. and that “native video is growing faster than other post types.” Videos are the most engaging type of post on social media, and native video is growing faster than any other type of post.
A majority of businesses would like to produce more videos in the upcoming year, as found in our State of Social 2018 report.
Conclusion
Every aspect of content creation can be systematized to produce dependable, high-quality content. Ideation is no different.
Before creating content, take the time to understand your audience and what they are interested in. Also, identify any pain points they may have so that you can address them in your content. Think of as many ideas as you can, and use whatever tools and methods you have to figure out which ideas are best and should be given more attention.
If you come up with a process for generating ideas and stick to it, you will never have trouble coming up with ideas for content that are interesting and compelling.
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