How to Come Up with Endless Content Ideas

On the content struggle bus? *beep beep* Feeling like your content isn’t resonating with your audience? Then, check out these tips and tricks for coming up with content ideas your fans will love!

Sick of being on the content creation hamster wheel? Stuck on ideas? Overthinking every. single. thing? Then, you’ve come to the right place! But before you can create any content or start your content calendar, I recommend nailing down the following things first:

Define your content niche

Before you can truly create great content, it’s important to have a good handle of your content niche. If you’re unsure what that is, ask yourself what things you’re passionate about and what skills you have. Your niche can easily be a fusion between the two, so do take some time to do this first!

What is your ICA?

Next, you’ll want to have an idea of WHO your ideal client avatar is (ICA). Get a good handle on their likes and dislikes, key demographics, their struggles, and more. This will allow you to create content that speaks directly to that type of person you want to target.

PRO TIP: Try creating yourself a customer avatar like my example below as a starting point. Then you can have a specific person in mind the next time you create!

1) Where is your audience hanging out?

After you’ve nailed down your niche and ICA, you’ll want to do some market research to generate some fresh content ideas! Figure out where your audience is hanging out so you know where to not only deliver your content, but so you can learn more about them. Some places you can start looking are:

Facebook groups
Review sites
Social media platforms
Community forums
Industry blogs

Where to find your audience for content ideas

What challenges is your audience facing?

Now it’s time to see what they might need help with. This is essentially your golden ticket to creating great content! It’s validation before you waste any time creating. Go straight to the horse’s mouth and sift through comments, reviews, forums, etc. for valuable insight straight from your ICA. Look out for questions they might have, struggles, or negative reviews that might help you uncover pain points.

Then ask yourself if you can address these challenges in your content – how can you help them solve these problems? What is your USP that your competitors might be missing that YOU can deliver?

2) Scope out your competition

Once you’ve done some initial research, you’ll also want to check out what’s working for your competitors! Check out their social media pages and see what type of content is getting good engagement with their audience (who is also likely to be your ideal audience 😉).

Check out popular industry blogs

You might also want to check out the top blogs in your niche and run a little audit to see which pages got the most traffic. This tells you these topics are most likely popular for your audience and therefore, would probably be content you should focus on. You can use SEMRush to see which pages receive most traffic.

SEMRush for seeing which content received high traffic — Here’s a snapshot of SEMRush for researching traffic volume on industry blogs!

You can also check out what type of content received the most shares on a competitors website to give you an idea of which blog posts resonated with your ideal audience. BuzzSumo is great for this!

3) Trending content search engines

Another great way to generate new content ideas is by using a predictive search engine. For example, Google Trends will give you valuable content predictions based on trending topics from the past.

Pinterest has also released “Pinterest Trends” where you can explore the current week’s top trending topics in a variety of categories. Want to get a step ahead of the game? Pinterest recently released “Pinterest Predicts” to predict a “not-yet-trending” report and stated that 8 out of 10 of their predictions for 2020 came true – pretty cool, if I do say so myself! These are all categorized by popular niches and can help you get ahead of the trend and deliver content to your audience at the right time!

Predictive searches for popular topics

Similarly, you can use the smart predictions on Pinterest, Google, YouTube to get a better understanding of what your audience is searching for

Pinterest smart feed tells you which topics are trending. — Here’s a glimpse of the Pinterest smart search!

Even Instagram is also becoming a much more SEO-friendly platform and you can now search a key term and it will give you more suggestions that are currently trending.

4) Raw search insights

For a very detailed and direct and HUNDREDS of ideas, I highly recommend checking out Answer the Public. Here you’ll type in a key word phrase in your niche and ATP will deliver real insights from Google searches that people are looking for around your keyword. It’s organized by questions, comparisons, and related phrases to your search query.

5) Ask your audience!

Lastly, as your audience what they want to see more of! You can do this via story polls, email survey, etc. If your audience isn’t engaging with your surveys because you’re just starting out, go to your competitors’ polls and take them to see what the majority wants to see!