Content marketing is a valuable strategy for growing your audience. However, the content creation process can take a lot of time, and many content marketers spend every day creating new content.

You might hit creative fatigue and not be able to come up with content creation ideas, which is completely normal and happens to the best of us. The next time you get stuck, try out one of these tips to help brainstorm ideas for your content.

 

Create a mind map

A mind map is a graphical representation of ideas and concepts that are related to each other. Start with one idea and then branch out into additional concepts that are related to that one idea. You can find several new topic ideas if you visualize your ideas this way.

 

Read the comments of your blog and social media

Your followers might be posting questions in the comments section of your blog and social media platforms. You can take those questions, compile them, and then answer them in a blog post.

Disqus allows you to monitor your blog’s comment section and determine which comments are popular. Disqus also has actionable content analysis that shows you which blog posts are performing best.

 

Ask your audience directly

You may be scratching your head, trying to figure out what your audience wants to read. Instead of leaving it to intuition, ask your audience directly what they want.

You can send a survey to your email list, create a poll on Twitter or Instagram Stories, or host a live stream where your audience can ask questions in real-time. This is something that we regularly try to do so that we are creating content that our audience actually wants to read about. Check out an example below:

 

See what your competitors are writing about

Check out what content is performing well for your competitors. Did their “how-to” article gain a lot of traction? You can write a blog post covering the same or similar topic with your opinion or experience on the matter.

You can also find gaps in their content that you could cover in your blog. A competitor analysis can help you stand out from them.

 

Open your blog to guest contributors

You may want to consider having guest contributors for your blog. This allows someone else to create content, and it’s also an excellent method to expand your blog’s reach. Your guest contributor will most likely share the article with their audience, which leads to a new audience finding you.

 

Ask your team for FAQs

Your team members could have great insight into new content ideas. Especially the team that interacts with your audience the most. This will most likely be your customer service or sales team.

They can help you identify questions that get frequently asked, share pain points of customers, and give insight into what your audience loves.

 

Update old content

Did you publish a recipe in 2018 that could use an update? Take a look at your current content and determine if there is anything that can be updated, and then share that updated post.

This can be easier than writing a whole new blog post from scratch. Your audience will also love updated content that matches their current needs.

 

Write down keywords and come up with related topics

Does your blog have an SEO keyword strategy? Even blog categories can help brainstorm new content ideas.

Similar to mind-mapping, write down the SEO keywords and blog categories that you have. Then start coming up with related topics and possible ideas. Even if you’ve already written on those topics, seeing the ideas laid out in front of you could help you come up with a fresh angle.

 

Next Steps

Ready to brainstorm? Pull out a piece of paper or your content calendar to start adding your content creation ideas. Don’t forget to ask your audience what they want - their input is valuable.

Which brainstorm idea do you like most for content marketing? Let us know in the comments.