Finding engaging content ideas is easy…when you know how. Learn 4 simple techniques for finding such ideas in this post.
One of small businesses’ biggest struggles, and I hear it over and over again, is finding stuff to blog about.
Well, I have good news for you: interesting content ideas hide all around you in plain sight.
You just haven’t had anyone show you where to look for them.
When you find ideas that interest your customers, you engage them and build relationships. Over time, they get to know, like, and trust you. And when they finally need what you sell, your name pops into their head.
Write the “wrong” ideas that bore them, and this process never even starts. They forget about you and move on to someone else that’s more useful and helpful.
So here’s some easy ways to find topics you know they’ll love:
- What questions do customers ask you in person over and over again?
Make a list of the most common ones. Those are blog post ideas that’ll be a resounding success. Questions that require a more in-depth response could be “special reports.”
You can also give brief answers in your FAQ section.
- Research with Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo’s a tool that’s absurdly easy to use. Go to their website. Enter in your topic by keyword. That’s it.
What’s really important, and I can’t stress this enough, is to look at the number of social shares each topic gets. The more social shares, the more attractive the topic. So, you can write your unique slant on the same topic.
Or maybe you can clarify something mentioned in that topic. Or you can disagree with it entirely.
You get to view 10 results for free, and you get something like 5 free searches daily. No need to use the paid version unless you want to become a serious content powerhouse (i.e. you want to hire a freelance writer to write your content for you).
- Industry and Competitor Blogs, and YouTube
The idea here is similar to Buzzsumo. Go to your competitor’s blogs, and leading industry blogs. Research topics on YouTube.
Buzzsumo doesn’t catch everything (but it is a nice tool).
Again, you’re looking for topics with the most social shares on these sites.
- Ask Your Customers What They’d Like to Know
Do this in person when they stop by. Or shoot a message out to your e-mail list. If one person wants to know, odds are many others do too.
One Way NOT to Do This: Searching Randomly on a Social Media Site Like Twitter
You can certainly go to Twitter, follow others in your niche, and see what they write about.
But that’s a huge mistake!
And that’s because you have no evidence supporting the popularity of the content. On Twitter, anyone can publish anything. And they might be publishing stuff they think their customers want to know…but really don’t care about.
That’s why you always get some evidence that at least some customers will like your topic: social shares, or the words directly from their mouths.
Remember, the Internet is Word-of-Mouth on Steroids
Because you can get so up close and personal with your customers, you can build relationships with them that are stronger than they were before the internet.
And when you’ve built those relationships, that increases word-of-mouth referrals.
Since social media makes it so easy to communicate and share, you can build lots of strong relationships and more sales much faster than you could before the web.
