5 ideas to generate fresh content for your blog
Having read Hubspot’s new benchmark report about how often your company should be posting a blog to increase inbound traffic to your website and increasing the opportunity to convert a customer; you’ve gone ahead and set your blogging goals for the year. After a great start and a fantastic run with content, suddenly you’ve hit the dreaded writer’s block and have no new ideas for generating fresh content for your blog.
With the next blog deadline looming, you have the dilemma of not knowing what to blog about after you’ve blogged about everything already. Fortunately for you there are a few tried and tested methods in which to get around your writers block, here are five ideas that could help.
1. Find ideas from others
If you’ve run out of ideas, have a look at what your competitors are doing. Of course you cannot take their ideas and use as is, but you can draw inspiration from them to generate new content ideas for your blog. Look at which blogs their audience engage with and use the topic ideas to expand on the topic or to offer an alternative viewpoint. Look at conferences and forums for interesting topics – this will help you come up with relevant and compelling content.
2. Ask the fans/customers
There are various ways to track what your customers are interested in. Look at your Google analytics for instance to see which blogs or pages on your website they visit the most. Also see which engagement posts on Social Media draw the greatest reactions. Read through comments and questions to understand what they need answered. This way your content can speak directly to your audience.
3. More than a blog
A great way to generate fresh content is to look at what you’ve done in the past. Reuse your content in a clever way by for instance using some Facebook content you posted and turning that into a blog. Or use your old blog article to create an infographic, a video or a post on Pinterest.
4. Don’t throw out the hard copy
Sometimes when you are looking for ideas you have to go offline – read a book that is relevant to your business industry, or page through a recent magazine. This gives you a new perspective and could give you some great concepts for online content that may just need an adjustment or a new angle.
5. Use topic generator tools
There are many topic generator tools that you could use to get your creative juices flowing. Try Portent’s content generator tool which is fun and easy to use. Pop in a keyword or two and it produces interesting (and silly) titles. Use different variations of keywords that relate to your industry and you’ll definitely find topics that could work for you.
The reality is that generating fresh content does take time and effort so it is important to have all the tools and tricks available to optimise the time spent on creating and generating fresh content for your blog.
Also read our blog about an effective sales and marketing plan and how to use it to support your blog content strategy.
Over to you
What other tools and tricks have helped you to overcome writers block?
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