On the quest of finding a consistent stream of relevant and important content to keep your customers engaged and the search engine rankings high, it can be challenging to keep great ideas flowing. One helpful technique is to keep an editorial calendar that can be filled in with ideas when they come up so you aren’t struggling at the last minute trying to decide what would be the most valuable type of content to post.
Customers are a great source for finding ideas to write about. When customers write in and ask questions about your product or services or mention ideas they are having that your products could solve, those are usually great topics to write a blog article or other content piece about. Because customers are asking, they will be interested in the information you offer. You can also ask them what they would like to learn more about as well. Using polls at your social media sites or asking questions for Twitter posts can help create ideas for content and keep your followers engaged at the same time.
There are a number of resources on the internet that can help you or your staff members keep interesting and engaging content pouring in. Using news services, bookmarking services or a blog content aggregator to see what is trending, going out to the search engines and typing in keywords, reading similar blogs or subscribing to RSS feeds about your business topic will help. Joining forums and question and answer sites can also offer a great number of ideas for content.
Don’t forget about your competition. While you don’t want to plagiarize their content, checking in to see what their hot topics are can give you ideas of how to offer similar information to your customers or potential customers. You can also find a great deal of content ideas offline as well. Trade magazines and trade events will usually have a storehouse full of content ideas.
Remembering that you will always need fresh content for your website and for social media marketing and search engine optimization and taking notes whenever you see anything relevant will help bring ideas in. That way instead of waiting until you think you should post and then trying to find something, you will save time and frustration by having a list of topics to choose from. Great content ideas can be found offline and online at any time and then jotted down on an editorial calendar for easy reference.
