You’ve got a deadline. Your newsletter readers are expecting a newsletter today. You need to make a few social media posts too. And you’re behind schedule as far as blogging goes.
The problem? You haven’t had any clever content ideas lately. Oh sure, you could easily whip something up just to fill the space. But you want to give your readers something really GOOD – something they want.
So, how do you come up with an almost unlimited trove of awesome content ideas? Simple- you just walk through the following 12 quick and easy methods…
Check Out Paid Products
The big benefit of this method is that it’s a twofer. Not only does it deliver plenty of content ideas your way, it also lets you do your market research at the same time. If you focus on bestselling products in your niche, then you know the topic is in-demand.
What you do is head over to marketplaces like Amazon, Udemy and ClickBank, as well as visiting your competitors’ sites to see what they’re selling. Each infoproduct topic as a whole will give you a content idea. Plus, you can generate dozens of extra ideas by browsing the sales letters and tables of contents of these products. Every bullet point in a sales letter is a potential topic for you to write about. And likewise, every chapter and subsection in a table contents will provide even more ideas for you to use.
Browse Your Competitors’ Free Content
Your next step is to find out what your competitors are writing about on their blogs, in their newsletters and on their social media sites. Pay particular attention to topics that generate a lot of discussion, likes and shares, as these are all indicators that a topic idea is in-demand.
Check Social Media Trends
Now head over to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media. What are people in your niche sharing on these sites? Which hash tags and news stories are trending? Each post and story will produce a potential topic idea for you.
Use a Keyword Tool
For this method, you open up your favorite keyword tool and input your niche keywords. The tool will then offer you dozens or even hundreds of topic ideas for you.
For example, if you enter in a broad search like “dog training,” you’ll get content ideas such as clicker training, how to deal with dog aggression, how to train a deaf dog and more. Each of these results is a potential topic idea for your next article, post, lead magnet or product.
Utilize Google Suggestions on how to have unlimited content ideas
Still another way to generate topic ideas is by typing your keywords into Google, and then looking at the suggestions list for ideas.
For example, if you type in “fat loss,” Google will suggest topics such as “fat loss meal plans” and “fat loss workouts.” Each suggestion is a potential idea for your next piece of content.
Check Out Tag Clouds
The idea behind this method is to go to popular blogs and forums and check out their tag (keyword) clouds. Each word in the cloud is a potential topic idea. And, as a nifty bonus, this method also gives you an idea of what might be popular, just based on how often a blogger or forum participants are talking about a particular topic.
Browse Q&A Sites
Here you hit up question and answer sites such as Quora.com, Yahoo! Answers, and even JustAnswer.com. Each question is a potential topic idea for you, plus you’ll find more topic ideas within the answers. You might even use this method to compile a list of questions to use in a FAQ-style article.
Research Offline Publications
Don’t limit your search to online content only. You can also use offline publications, such as newspapers, magazines and books, to give you content ideas. In particular, pay attention to magazine covers, whose publishers tend to do a lot of research to determine which articles they should put on the cover to help the publication sell well.
For example, if you’re writing about dog training, then check out the popular magazine “Dog Fancy” to discover dozens of content ideas in every issue.
Check Your Emails/DMs
If you’re got a pretty good business going, then you probably have people emailing or DM’ing you with niche questions. Each question is a potential topic idea for you.
And here’s a related idea…
Ask Your Audience
A good way to generate a quick boatload of ideas is to ask your audience what they’d like to learn more about. You can do all of this very informally, such as blogging about it, asking your social media contacts, or even having subscribers email you with topics.
Look at PLR Content
Do you have any private label rights content on your hard drive? If so, browse through it for content ideas. The bonus of this method is that you don’t even need to write the content from scratch, since the bulk of the work will be done for you.
In addition, you can also see what popular PLR vendors are selling in your niche, as each piece of content is a potential content idea for you. As a bonus, the best vendors research their content before selling it, so any content ideas you discover are probably also in-demand in your niche.
Check Your Own Content
The next thing you can do is check your own content, such as your blog, newsletter, social media platforms and paid products. Ask yourself if there is an older piece of content that needs updating. You can also expand on short pieces of content, pull excerpts out of longer pieces of content, and pull ideas out lists.
For example, let’s suppose you have a fairly popular article on your blog that shares 10 tips. You could turn each of those ten tips into its own full-length article or report.
Another example: maybe you have an ebook sharing the five steps of a process. You can create an article that shares an overview of the five steps. The bonus of this method is that it naturally leads to you promoting the paid product.
Conclusion
So, how to have unlimited content ideas? There you have it – you just discovered 12 ways to generate a nearly limitless number of ideas for your next piece of content. So, the next time you’re wondering what to write about, just revisit this article to quickly generate dozens or hundreds of awesome ideas!
