Coming Up with Better Content Ideas
An unbelievable amount of content is published every single day – podcasts, blog posts, videos, memes and photos and making your content stand out from the competition is no mean feat. You can compete with the big boys, though – the secrets of the big ad and PR agencies are no longer kept hidden away in ivory towers – all you need to is to go online and to know where to look!
Learn from your competition
Looking at what your rivals are doing is the most basic – and one of the best – ways to come up with ideas. There are a few web-based tools that’ll work out which types of content work best in your niche, mainly by looking at how they perform for your competition. You can use tools to drum up the best keywords, to see who the main publishers for which types of content are and lots of other goodies.
Improve and elaborate on others’ ideas
You can’t create in a vacuum, so you need to be constantly looking around to see what everyone else is doing. It’s not plagiarism, it’s inspiration, especially if you expand on the theme and do a better job!
Look at the major players to see what you can work with. Look out for gaps or new angles so you can complement and fill in your industry news. Make sure you use your own opinions and experiences, as well as your own facts and figures, photos and videos. You can even disagree with the major players.
Lookat other industries
There’s nothing wrong with a bit of cross-pollination, especially if you use some ideas that haven’t made it into your sector yet – or ideas that people said couldn’t be done.
Learn what your people really need
Good content marketing relies on understanding your target audience and what it wants, then giving it to them. If you have a chicken-keeper blog, think about what your readers worry about in any given month and speak to this.
You also need to be able to create different personas as you go along. Younger chicken-keepers will be more interested in ideas for selling eggs and will want easy-to-read content that “sounds” like a loving grandmother.
More senior chook-lovers will want up-to-date, authoritative info on diseases and lice, for example.