If you own a website or blog, one of the essential things you need to do is create great content. Content that catches the interest of your audience and leads them to take action. If you have been at it for a while, at some point, you’re going to run out of content ideas.
It happens to everyone, even the best writers. Fortunately, there are a few simple tips you can use to beat your mental block. Use these 5 tips to create some new content ideas that your audience is going to love.
Revisit Previously Published Content
Don’t obsess over trying to come up with new content ideas all the time. It’s a popular saying that history never dies. Plus, most content ideas are really not that new, as someone out there has probably written on it at some point. So there is no harm in revisiting your old content ideas, as long as you don’t overdo it.
You also shouldn’t just copy and paste your old content in new posts. In fact, you will need to tweak and rephrase the subject addressed in the previous content. Furthermore, you might not want to focus solely on your own old content, but you could also review content from other sources. Be careful about this point though, and remember that It is still ethically wrong to plagiarize so make sure to be careful not to plagiarize the content of others.
Even without giving your content a complete makeover, you can still ensure that you do not let it die. If it is out of date, you can simply update it with recent data without necessarily adding fresh content. Using this tactic could be especially useful for businesses in fields or industries with a rapid pace of innovation.
Finally, you could also re-work old content and present it with a new perspective and newer ideas and facts so that it is identical but different from old content.
Personal Stories
When you’re not sure about what else to post, you can just post personal stories. To properly deliver this genre of content though, you have to master the art of storytelling so you can connect better with your audience.
Also, personal stories allow you to always share content that is unique. These stories inform the customers about events in your personal life. For instance, the stories could be a motivational story about your rise to success, an interesting story from your past or maybe just a recent event in your life you want people to know about.
Make the Most of Social Media
Another simple strategy you could use to come up with great content ideas is to simply ask your audience since they’ll be the ones reading it. Moreover, your audience probably has a very good idea of what they would like to hear from you! To find out, you could create a poll or survey and post it on your social media profiles with a simple question. For instance, “what content would you like us to share next?”
If you have no idea of the interests of your audience, asking a question in this way is a great way to invite open-ended questions which tend to be informative. On the other hand, if you already have some idea of the various topics your audience tends to be interested in, then you could create a pool with multiple options.
If you have a client persona created, which you should, you could even talk to prospects who fit this persona when you meet them in the real world, to find out what type of content they would be interested in consuming.
Check out the 8 best social media platform and which ones are best for your business
Copy the competition
Every once in a while, it is a good practice to glance over at your competitors to see what they’re doing and see if you can emulate the tactics that are working for them. By now, you should have a great idea of who the top websites and content creators in your industry are, so you can go on over to their pages and see if you can find some great ideas that you haven’t covered already.
As noted previously, plagiarism is something you’re going to want to avoid so be sure that while you borrow ideas, all content is kept unique and original.
A great tool to analyze the competition is SEMRush
Data and Analytics
The last point on this list is really the first place you should start from when it comes to content ideas. Data analysis will help you figure out what pieces of content your audience tends to love on your website, which will give you an idea of what other similar pieces of content you produce.
