Stuck for ideas? How to generate awesome content!

Tick-tock, it’s the publishing deadline clock! I open a new document, research a bit, check my email, book a car service appointment, glance at the screen, staring at the blinking cursor, get up for a drink, call my daughter, get back to my desk and guess what? That screen is still there, waiting like a patient blind date and it’s been two hours already. I need great content ideas! What are topics to write about?

Sounds familiar?

If you are in any way into content creation, chances are that you’ve had plenty of opportunities at staring at a perfectly unfriendly blank screen, agonizing what to write about. Or maybe you’ve faced the dreaded question from your team- have you written something yet?

Increasingly, regular content creation is an essential part of every business and it soon becomes apparent that without a clear strategy and methodology, we’re just re-living the same nail-biting desperation of what to write about. For businesses especially, the writing has to be relevant to their audience, for sure.

How do you come up with topics to ensure that you create better content for your customers?

You’re thinking “What can I write about?” or “How do I come up with blog post ideas that resonate with my audience?”

Importantly, how do you find that elusive balance between your business goals, your expertise, and your audience needs?

Here are a few tactics that you can apply when you are stuck for ideas. Even if you actually write on cue with the submission date, having a bank of ideas will give you something substantial to work with. You can even use them to plan an editorial calendar that works for both you and your audience.

How to generate awesome content? What are topics to write about?

Decide the level of content

In relation to the type of content, keep assessing what level is your target user at right now? Are they at the start of their journey, somewhere in the middle or advanced? This will help you decide between writing on a topic like ‘7 Effective Ways to Build your Brand with Content’ versus ‘How to use Content to gain Traffic, Leads, and Repeat Customers!

Here are examples of articles on our blog that can help an early Instagram user getting started on Instagram and another one that shares insights for an intermediate level of Instagram expertise.

Organize your ideas

Before we start, it is important to take stock of our processes.

Alfred Hitchcock famously said, “Ideas come from everything.”  More than bad ideas fear lost ideas.

While there are scores of ways to document your fleeting brilliance, at Maroon Oak, we use a combination of Trello and Google Sheets that allow us to document and collaborate on the go, with ease.

Did we mention that it’s FREE!

Consume Content

Author Allen Gannett of The Creative Curve has a fascinating perspective – “Consumption is correlated to creative genius. All creatives are also huge consumers.”

Why? Because consuming content opens up new ideas, thoughts, and possibilities that we can intertwine with our business needs.

Here’s a twist though. You must also consume content that your audience is consuming. E.g. Subsequent to watching Marie Forleo’s episode on fear and the way the topic resonated with her audience, we were excited to include in our blog repertoire an article by Business Coach Amy Applebaum – 5 bold strategies: Make fear work for success. Not surprisingly, we received great feedback from our audience.

Read 22 books to get savvy with business, brand, and money!

Ask the customer

While the tried and tested ways of in-person, phone calls or surveys still work, you can now smartly monitor online conversations that we are all fortunately privy to. A lot of data today is freely accessible. Facebook and LinkedIn groups are full of nuggets related to customer pain points. Even comments and conversations on blog articles and Instagram posts reveal what is missing and can be fulfilled. We frequently use polls in our group and elsewhere to determine customer pain points and helps us decide what to write about.

A thread on Mentors on one particular Facebook group led to over 300 comments and inspired us to cover that topic on our blog Mentors matter! How to Seek, Meet & Grow with one.

A popular thread in our Facebook group that called for women to define what success meant to them, inspired us to publish this blog by Reiki Master and Meditation Coach Nidhi Idnani A Guide to Working for a Balanced Life, where we also included our video on success.

Also read How to Write Website Content That Generates Organic Traffic

Mix it up

A healthy content mix for your business should comprise of topics that educate your audience, inspire them, and generate PR and high-quality links. Once you categorize your existing blog articles, it helps to give clarity on the direction of content your blog needs. E.g: If you realize that 70% of your content is inspirational, contemplate exploring some educational and PR generation blog topics (Like this round-up on books recommended by entrepreneurs)!

Note: Roundups are a fabulous way to curate content. Not everything on your blog needs to be from the first principle. Roundups help develop relationships with new contacts while adding to the conversation and traffic to your blog.

Keywords

The words that a user uses to search. So simple, yet so complicated. Or maybe not.

Before you deep dive into Keyword Analytics, let a basic Google search be your first level advisor. Google autocomplete is an excellent source of keyword ideas. According to Google, autocomplete predictions are automatically generated by an algorithm based on factors like the popularity and freshness of search terms and how often past users have searched for a term.

For writing this blog post, I attempted a quick exercise on a Google Search bar. As you can clearly see, ‘What can I write about’ (443,000,000 results) was the top autocomplete suggestion by Google. And  ‘How to think of blog post ideas’ (891,000,000 results) came up second in another search. One can safely assume that ‘Writer’s block’ or ‘Bloggers block’ is a common affliction.

I also decided to include these two search terms or long-tail keywords in the body of this article. Can you find them?

If you want to take keywords up a notch, UberSuggest and Semrush are great free tools, for deep diving into related keywords, providing you with hundreds of keyword suggestions, from long tail to head terms and LSI (related) keywords.

Nadya Khoja of Drunk Entrepreneurs has a fantastic method that she uses along with Google Keyword Planner for long-term, strategical content ideas and their proper documentation.

Want to get better at SEO and Keywords? Grab our the best FREE Tools from the experts.

Catch the trend

Most popular, big-name publications or blog aggregators like Medium have a trending section. If they serve a similar target market, hop over, and get inspired by their popular blogs.

You can also use Buzz-sumo or Google Trends to get up-to-date events in the news, that you can then write about, to ride the wave or newsjack as they call it.

Eg: Reese Witherspoon’s phenomenal address ‘Ambition is not a dirty word’ was the perfect time to write posts on ambition.

This serves a dual purpose. Not only does it solve your dilemma on what are the topics to write about, but also by utilizing news-jacking, you initiate a part of content marketing and promotion from the get-go.

Another good practice is to keep a calendar of events to remind you of upcoming holidays or celebrations, lest you’re caught off guard on World Cross-Word Day or International Women’s Day.

Here’s a calendar we shared with our audience on our Facebook group. During March, this gave them a good idea to plan future content that tied their audience’s needs with the seasonal trend.

Look microscopically within

Scan your popular articles and ask the following questions. Is there a subtopic that I can elaborate on in further detail? Is there a common theme between certain blogs that I can over-arch with a broader blog and cross-link internally. After all, this is content you have already worked so hard on.

It is your moral marketing duty towards your blog to maximize its potential.

Learn awesome ways to use content to gain Traffic, Leads and Repeat Customers in our FREE webinar!

Creative Research

Sometimes all it takes is a spark to take your mind on a creative roll. Here are some more resources, that may have not occurred to you to turn towards for inspiration for blog topic ideas.

Instagram

Type in a relevant hashtag on Instagram to see the top posts under that. I searched for #newblogpost and #writersblock. Try for yourself and see how many posts turn up. There’s also video now,  under each hashtag category, to inspire you even more.

Want more engagement and leads from Instagram? Check out these awesome resources on Instagram for Business!

Pinterest

A powerful, visual search engine, here’s what the autocomplete showed when I simply typed the word blog. Blog post ideas were the second most searched. Just going through the pins that pulled up gave a ton of related ideas for topics. From ‘20 questions that will inspire a year’s worth of blog posts’ to ‘85 fill in the blank blog title templates,’ the choice was good.

Also read, The complete guide to selling your products on Pinterest!

Amazon

Searching in the books category of Amazon, try to search as your audience would for a book. Some good books can pack a power punch of inspirational titles, chapter by chapter.

When I put in ‘content creation’ in book search, here’s what came up.

In a similar manner, you can use other social media sites for inspiration. All of them will provide a treasure trove of related content and sub-topics that you can park for future use. Use your discretion to tweak the titles and add your unique flavor to customize.

Blog Topic Generators

Fortunately, they are a thing and occasionally the results are hilarious but overall, these are really helpful. Just putting the word content, offered me over 500 headlines in Title Generator. Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator is another useful tool.

Conclusion

Rather than instant writing prompts, this post will provide you with a framework to smartly research and plan your content ideas. For the purpose of this blog, I set out to illustrate the relevance and need for the topic I was writing about, i.e. how to generate blog topic ideas. The pain point in this case, ‘writer’s block’ was something that I had personally experienced and so a good starting point.

Most days, cooking is easier than deciding what to cook, but a meal plan makes it oh so simple! Similarly, accumulating a bank of relevant topic ideas can make the next step in content writing so much more approachable.

Good content is about providing value and tht should be your north star when you are agonizing over what to write about. The content that sits at the intersection of personal expertise, the audience’s needs and your business goals is the one that thrives.

Note: While the information above is believed to be accurate and recent, readers are advised to do their own fact finding before making any decisions. Maroon Oak does not endorse or recommend any specific learning institution, nor has the Company been compensated in any way for listing the names above.

Articles by Aditi

You can’t use up creativity. The more you create, the more you have.

A Designer and Entrepreneur, Aditi graduated from a top design school and subsequently started her own design and merchandising business. Co-founder at Maroon Oak, she has over 17 years of business experience with Two Dotts, her design consulting company and an Etsy store which serves as an outlet for her gifts and patented product designs.

A mother to a teen and a tween, she enjoys running, dancing and raising her newest baby, a Bichon named Miltie.