If your business relies on high-quality content for increasing brand awareness and engaging potential customers, “blank page syndrome” is no picnic.

We’ve talked about writer’s block before – namely, we’ve shared three hacks to help you overcome it when you actually sit down to write.

Here’s the thing, though – writing is the easy part! Knowing what to write about, on the other hand… not so much.

Whether you’re writing blog posts, gathering data for infographics, creating presentations, or scripting out whiteboard and cartoon animation videos… running out of ideas is not something you can afford.

So, what if you need fresh ideas for new content, and you need them yesterday? Thankfully, there are plenty of places online you can search to find more ideas than you’ll know what to do with!

In today’s post, we will explore five of them. Each can provide you with dozens of promising topics, with relatively little effort.

Whether you’re in a last-minute pickle and need a fresh topic to save the day – or you want to get several months’ worth of ideas in advance – you’ll be able to do both.

Let’s dive in, and see which “idea goldmines” are available to you!

Unexpected Goldmine

1. Customer emails

Communications from your prospects and customers are not just a good source of testimonials, but also a terrific way to generate content ideas.

Any time someone emails you with a question, shares a story of success or failure, or even criticizes your product or service, you should view it as an untapped content opportunity.

Incoming emails provide you with material for:

  • Case studies (if a customer enjoyed massive success, you should tell the world).
  • How-to articles (because some answers aren’t well-suited to email)
  • Simple Q&A-style content pieces (where you just answer common questions).

Sometimes the emails you receive will fall somewhere in between: not completely useless, but not “meaty” enough to give you any ideas for content. You can always use them later, maybe to illustrate a point (e.g. by quoting them in your content), or as testimonial material.

2. Reader comments

A tightly-knit, engaged community is a precious resource that even successful brands can’t always foster. If you are fortunate enough to receive thoughtful, valuable comments from readers of your company blog – or your social media accounts – you can mine those for content ideas, too!

Similar to customer emails, reader comments can make excellent fodder for how-to blog posts or videos, as well as case studies. But there’s one other way to use them, and we think it’s by far the most valuable…

Most comments, by definition, will relate to a specific piece of content you’ve published before. So why not take this valuable input and use it to improve and update said piece of content? Not only is it amazing for SEO purposes – you can re-publish older content for more traffic and exposure. Win-win!

3. Quora

If you haven’t heard of Quora before, it’s a platform where people ask questions on all sorts of topics: from copywriting to finance, to fictional characters – and other people (many of them respected experts) answer them.

In one of our previous posts, we described how you can use Quora to get more traffic. Well, Quora is good for more than that!

You must have guessed by now that Quora’s Q&A format makes it a great place to find content ideas.

Need a promising topic? Search the questions, and you’ll have dozens of them in no time! Are you stuck on what to write? Explore the best answers and use them for inspiration (note: don’t swipe them word for word, that wouldn’t be cool).

4. Reddit

As the world’s ninth most popular website, Reddit is an endless source of content ideas – if you know where to look.

Due to millions of users posting on tens of thousands of different subjects daily, unearthing ‘gold nuggets’ of promising topics can be a challenge. Here’s what you can do to to save yourself lots of time and potential overwhelm:

  • Only look at the most upvoted discussions in particular subreddits. For example, if your product or service is related to personal finance, and you want to get some fresh content ideas, you should investigate the most upvoted threads in “/r/personalfinance”.
  • Experts and thought leaders from all industries show up on Reddit all the time to do AMAs (“ask me anything” events). Those AMAs are an excellent source of content ideas – you can swipe them without even trying, and also get some great insights just by looking at the responses!

5. Competing content

Finally, one source of content ideas is hiding in plain sight… it’s the content your competitors are posting. Nine times out of ten, you can either improve on it, put a spin on it, or reverse-engineer a popular piece of content based on it.

First, you need to look at the already-popular content in your industry (use a tool like BuzzSumo to get it done). That should give you plenty of proven content to work with.

Then, you have a few options:

  1. Improve on your competitor’s content by making it ten times better – this is known as “The Skyscraper Technique”, and it’s a terrific strategy for putting out world-class content without having to reinvent the wheel.
  2. Create an “expanded list post” – whenever you see one piece of content covering multiple points (but not digging deep into any of them), all you need to create an amazing piece is to go the extra mile and elaborate on everything that’s mentioned there… turning it from something run-of-the-mill and derivative into comprehensive and valuable.
  3. Focus on one point and dig deep – sometimes a throwaway line in someone else’s content piece can become a basis for something incredible. Narrowing it down won’t make it worse – on the contrary, single-minded focus will improve your content and make it stand out.

Next time you want to come up with a few ideas for compelling content, remember that the Internet is brimming with ideas. These five “goldmines” barely even scratch the surface! Now that you have dozens of promising topics at your fingertips, you won’t ever have to stare at a blank screen again. Enjoy!

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