Writing is often idealized. Cool as it seems, you sit in pleasant surroundings, open your laptop, and the typing begins.
Yet, the truth is different – challenging and confusing sometimes. But if you are set on the path, the rewards of creativity are immense.
Staying creative is tough, especially if it’s a daily responsibility. Composing a piece of writing is not a complete-in-a-second task—a lack of ideas hits at some point. You arrive in despair of what to write about. You feel like you have included all the topics there are to cover.
This happens when you create content for a website and write repeatedly, especially around the same topic. Moreover, you should be unique and stay interesting so that people enjoy reading your blogs.
According to statistics, 77% of Internet users consume blog information. Imagine how gripping your content needs to be to attract readers’ attention.
To stay interesting, you need to find content ideas. That’s why you will benefit from learning how to find topics to write about and not bore the reader.
You want your thoughts to be head-turning, your blogs attention-grabbing, and the content clickable. It requires effort to fight against writer’s block.
Content ideas: overcoming the writer’s block
The deficit of content ideas is such a commonality among content writers that there is a term for the calling.
Writer’s block is the creativity shut down or slow down in any writer’s experiences.
When writer’s block hits, the writers usually find themselves stuck in composing a piece, staring at the paper or an open document for hours, unable to collect thoughts and spice them with originality.
Besides interfering with your writing, writer’s block is usually associated with a lack of ideas. Not a medical condition, but the seriousness needs to be fought against—the urge to write clashes with writer’s block.
We have been there. We have done that.
12 hands-on ways to find fresh content ideas
Knowing the tactics to generate new content ideas is the most effective way for getting out of the condition. After all, the innovations, tools, and techniques have armed us with the resources to dig into new topics and keep the readers gripped with content.
You are in the right spot to discover hands-on practices you can use to find new content ideas. I have amassed the twelve techniques I use to confront writer’s block when generating content ideas.
Use them and master the art of content writing.
Be on topic
You may be an expert writer who composes content for different blogs from different industries for different audiences and niches. Refrain from getting puzzled yourself or puzzling the readers; first, think of which blog your ideas are for. Find the thread of relevancy. The content should be based on the target audience’s interests and questions.
You want to create content for a website that is insightful, resonates with your audience, gives value to them, and is helpful to consume. The point is to avoid getting astray with topics in your topic research process. You must be well aware of the blog’s audience before hitting the typing.
Combining the knowledge of the audience and the blog’s topicality, you will stay put for new ideas in the field you are writing for. This foresight becomes instrumental in elevating the quality of your content. Meaningful and insightful content is also linkable. It will enhance their potential for generating backlinks. When you monitor backlinks of your website, you will see the content in a favorable position.
Use open data
The Internet is your savior on the battlefield of idea deficiency. You must dig deep into the open data –tap on people’s interests, questions, and inquiries. The two most popular platforms for generating content ideas are Quora and Reddit. People of different demographics, backgrounds, and interests come to these platforms to find what they don’t find blogs about.
Here you go, extracting their questions for upcoming blog articles.
You can find anything on Quora and Reddit. Discussions get heated under a variety of topics. You search for topical keywords, and the forum suggests you a plethora of related questions that people ask. Question discussions on Quora and industry-related subreddits on Reddit are hidden places for your content idea hunts.
The open question-asking platforms should be your mine to generate new content ideas. On such platforms, you will find questions that can be translated into interesting blogs and materials people are searching for and willing to consume. Meet your audience where they are expressing their interests.
Ask your audience
The best way to learn what the audiences want is by asking. You can search yourself and squeeze the Internet data. However, only the exact audience knows what they need in real life.
Questions can be asked through surveys and queries on a regular basis.
Not to run out of content ideas and have content ideas collected for later reference, here is a strategy:
- Collect a number of survey questions
- Create a form with these questions
- Send the form out to your audience at some intervals
You can include such queries in this form to generate maximum data for new ideas. When gathering feedback, you may compose questions like:
- What is interesting to learn about in [niche]?
- Which categories of blogs do you enjoy most?
- What are you struggling with [niche]?
Getting responses from your dedicated readers regularly will be your winning coin. The readers will inspire you with ideas you have never thought of, and it’s a win-win. Since you have no lack of topics and they will get the answers to their queries. Keep the ideas in the content backlog and develop those over time.
Read comments
Similar to asking directly, you can gather ideas from the comment sections. Since you are familiar with the comments under your posts, it’s time to examine competitors’ social media posts’ comment sections. It may require a little time to cover the task; however, at the end of the day, you will have gathered information for different types of content.
Comments, like open forums, are places people express their concerns. People ask what they are unaware of. You should pick these questions and educate the readers with your content. This method helps you tap into the audience’s interests.
Your social media accounts, blog, and competitors’ social media accounts are ideal scroll-throughs for new ideas.
Update your feed
Social media is the ideal place to explore what trends there are in the industry and what people, aka your potential customers, are discussing. The logic is the same; you extract the new topic ideas for different types of content but in another form.
Social media’s popularity makes it the place where trends are discussed. There are many methods to find content ideas from social media, and those are:
- Industry-related groups
- Following people’s activities
- Following your followers’ interactions with your current content
- Exploring the industry-trending hashtags
- Tracking influencers’ activities and the topics they discuss
- Filter the comments section, pain points, complaints, interests
You see, scrolling your feed regularly doesn’t always produce toxicity. If you are a creative content creator, social media can be your safe place to find content ideas and conduct topic research.
Allocate some time of the day to follow what’s happening on your social media feed, take out some interesting points, and collect them in a sheet to reference later when you hit the threatening writer’s block.
Read competitor FAQs
The blog’s FAQ section is perfect for idea generation for topic research. It is where the hot questions are asked and answered. Most importantly, it covers article-related questions which the article doesn’t touch upon.
The conclusion? You can be the first one to cover these burning questions comprehensively and professionally. The topics interest people; why not conduct deeper topic research and produce deeper content?
Your competitors’ FAQ section is where you can find content ideas for your audience to enjoy. It is the hidden spot of the ideal topic ideas. Read!
Explore Google’s PAA section
When all the above-mentioned tricks were not trendy, content creators relied on self-thought methods, which are today used as traditional alternatives. Still providing good results when generating ideas.
The PAA section, which is “people also ask” on Google, is like the FAQ. However, this time the variety of questions is more extended. And it’s not composed by the competitor page’s content creator but is generated by Google based on related questions people ask.
So your strategy should be the following.
Let’s say you have a blog content titled “10 Ways to Create Clickable Content”. Search the question “How to create clickable content,” go to the “people also ask” section, go through the questions, and compile your ideas in your ideas spreadsheet for reference.
The best thing about the PAA section is that it’s free of use and takes little time to find topic-related content ideas. The con of this method comes in when you don’t have a general topic and are confused about what to write about or how to find topics to write about.
Thus, when you run out of creativity, pick your wide research topic and jump to Google’s People Also Ask section. And when you have no idea at all, go after the broad topic search.
Brainstorm with your team
Your team is there to help, from completing tasks to getting you out of despise, like writer’s block. As different teams interact with customers at different stages and solve different problems, they have data gathered which can give you content ideas for various types of posts.
When brainstorming with your team, you should also consider improving your website’s backlink profile and other factors affecting your SEO and website performance.
Talk to both your immediate and the general team and discuss the current problems that customers are experiencing. Take out ideas of what interests the customers; specifically, write down their questions. Then prepare a well-researched article covering these pain points and present it to mitigate the reader’s concerns. Here you have a win-win of creating content that will get read and satisfy the loyal readers.
Post a question on LinkedIn
The simplest way to learn something is by asking. Ask the right questions to get the right answers. Next to Quora, a social media platform with comments sections, LinkedIn is the most utilized platform in our team. Not only to build a personal brand, expand our network, and share thoughts but also to ask for opinions, concerns, and troubles customers have with our services.
Whenever the struggle of the lack of ideas hits, posting on LinkedIn or directly asking specific questions to specific people comes in handy. The network, the followers, and the users of the service and product are always reachable. So, use the resources of people you have gathered and nourished over time.
Follow hot topics in the industry
Constantly indulged in the content creation process, you are sometimes so much into the process that you forget to follow what is happening in the industry. Staying up to date with the trends, hot topics, and industry news is your key to new ideas to create content for a website.
You know your audience’s profile, likes and dislikes, and the type of content they enjoy consuming. All you need to do is find industry leaders to follow. Like scrolling social media, dedicate time to reading industry trends and collecting ideas. These should be ideas in the scope of your audience’s interests.
You don’t have to produce something from scratch. Your best approach will be to present the trending topic in a language, sense, and manner that will appeal to your audience.
Listen to topic-related podcasts
The materials of reference are rising wide and growing in number daily. Maybe not popular a few years ago, but today podcasting with the intent to educate consumers on a product or service sector is a common practice.
Thought leaders in the industry share insights on the industry’s popular trends, raise the most controversial topics of discussion and the concerns people hold with the trends. Where else could you find content ideas if not in this famous and widely-consumed resource?
Thus, depending on your industry and the available broadcasted resources, filter the ones you want to listen to and schedule when you will consume the information to generate new content ideas for your new blogs to rank.
Use research tools
Content writing is inseparable from keywords. It is based on the key phrases; the better the metrics of these phrases, the wider the writing will reach. Your ideas should also be around trending keywords with good metrics. However, be cautious not to engage in keyword stuffing, as overusing keywords can harm your content’s readability and SEO performance.
SEO tools are great resources for this search. Ahrefs is what we use at our agency for researching primary keywords and as a tool to find ideas for different types of content.
The tool has a cool feature that features the related terms to your search. Thus, when you search for a term you always discuss in your blog, the tool will browse thousands of new related keywords or stem phrases that you can collect as content ideas.
Using the tool is to your advantage since you save time. Well, the tool searches for you. The tool will guide you through your website’s content gaps and open an immense database of new ideas.
Uncover the Strategies of new content ideas
The variety of strategies we discussed gives you a choice when you want to find content ideas. On the idea hunts, you have a plethora of tactics at your disposal. From exploring social media in and out to ask questions and many more, there is more in gathering new ideas and fighting the unavoidable writer’s block.
A lack of ideas is common among content creators. Creativity is not at its highest. That’s why a backup plan is a savior.
The goal is to collect the approx ideas ahead of time. Organize your time, the right tools and resources, and mechanisms for idea gathering. If you have the plan in place, it means you are in full control to bypass writer’s block, possibly much.
Or if you can create such a structure as to have reserved ideas, you won’t have to clash with the limits of new topics.
FAQ about finding new content ideas
When do you need content ideas?
You need content whenever you want to drive traffic to your website, generate leads, stay up-to-date with industry trends, provide value, and build good relationships with your audience. When you create various types of content for your blog, website, or social media, there comes a stage when you need more ideas. At this phase, you will need to find new ideas.
How to stay creative when you write for the same blog all the time?
Writer’s block happens to most of us. When it comes along, your creativity should spark. There are strategies that can help you overcome the challenge, from taking a break to clear your head to changing up your writing style. You can also experiment with different formats, i.e., articles, infographics, or videos.
What types of content are popular with readers?
Among the most read and popular content types that people consume are blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, and podcasts.
