5 places to get fresh content ideas every day

Sooner or later in content marketing, you hit the dreaded brick wall. You’ve covered every relevant topic to the point where writing any more blogs feels like blatant repetition. It takes longer to come up with original content ideas and you’re less convinced they’re relevant enough to have the desired effect.

This is a natural part of the content marketing process and something we all have to go through. Luckily, there are plenty of places you can go to find new ideas on a daily basis and here are five of our favourites.

1. Use Facebook to see what content is engaging people

Type your keywords into Facebook Search and you get a long list of the most popular content flying around the network. You can see how many shares, comments, likes and reactions each piece gets – an invaluable tool for knowing what kind of content is making an impact.

2. Use Quora to discover what questions people are asking

Quora is a great place to see what kind of questions people are asking about your industry. Again, all you have to do is type in your keywords and a list of questions pops up. Use these as inspiration for new website content ideas and then reach out to whoever asked the question in the first place, pointing them and everyone else to your content.

3. Create a Feedly list of your competitors

Feedly is one of the most popular news aggregators, with apps for both iOS and Android devices, as well as an online application. Basically, you collect a long list of blogs and news sites into a single list of content inspiration. It’s one of the fastest ways to see what everyone else in your industry is writing about.

4. Go to Reddit for both sides of the debate

Reddit isn’t just great for sourcing content topics, it’s an interesting place to hear other people’s insights. You’ll have to scroll your way through some troll comments and wisecracks, but there are always people willing to share genuine insights. You can also sign up to topic discussions (e.g. content marketing) which are ideal for industry talk.

5. Tap into Twitter trends

While Facebook provides better insights into user engagement, Twitter tells you what people are talking about most right now. If you’re quick, you can put a new spin on the hottest topics and get some of your own trending content in the works.

How to turn these resources into fresh content ideas

The five sources we’ve looked at are great places to get fresh content ideas, but all they really do is connect you to existing content. So how do you turn this into original ideas of your own? This is where your creativity needs to shine but there are some tried and tested methods that work time and again.

• Beat your competitors: Publish bigger, better and more valuable stuff than all of your competitors put together.
• Become a news source: Cover breaking news to establish yourself as a place people come to for the latest industry developments.
• Challenge common ideas: You’ll find a lot of content simply repeats what everyone else is already saying. Challenge those ideas to create unique content that stands out.
• Curate content: Create lists of valuable content from around the web into handy lists for your readers.
• Go multimedia: Cover the same topics in a different format – e.g. video, infographic, podcast, etc.
• Expand upon existing content: Go into more detail, add relevant points/arguments and come up with something new to say.

Hopefully, the tips we’ve looked at today will help you fight off content marketer’s block. It’s one of those things you have to deal with and learn to overcome in this game, but your competitors all have the same problem. The trick is to keep on top of what they’re doing and constantly find ways to better it. Rather than looking at what content they are publishing, ask yourself what they aren’t creating and what opportunities this presents.

Check out these related articles:

• Content: How to reduce, reuse and recycle
• How to write a blog – from ideas to promotion
• Using website data to discover content that works