It’s the time of year when everyone who does content work for a startup or tech company here in the Bay area wants to talk about how to generate story ideas. They know I do this work for a living and they want tips as they prepare their 2018 content strategies.
It’s safe to say that if you’re fully committed to content marketing, you have to write a boatload of content. And constantly coming up with new topics and ideas for this is no easy task.
There are many strategies you can use to find new topics. Some of my favorites involve monitoring what your audience is saying online: through visiting industry forums, Q&A sites like Quora and your blog and social media comments.
But even with these strategies, it’s not uncommon to run out of ideas. This post will offer an alternative process you can use to guarantee that you never run out of content ideas again.
1: Use tools to find popular posts you can write better.
This is my go-to strategy for finding out which posts are driving traffic to big-name sites. Since I largely write about topics in the startup, entrepreneur, tech, SEO and content marketing space, I like to look at sites like Entrepreneur (duh), Mashable and TechCrunch, as they typically cover these topics. You’ll likely know which big sites are worth analyzing for your niche or industry.
Using a tool like Buzzsumo, I simply plug in the subject area I’m most interested in, and I can generate a list of the most shared articles on the Internet about that subject.
Once you spend enough time using this tool, you start to get a feel for which subject areas get more shares than others. Now that I know this topic is worth targeting (in terms of potential traffic), I can figure out how to cover this topic in a different and better way.
Although it’s beyond the scope of the post, I’ll share a few strategies I typically use to improve on a competitor’s post:
- Write a longer, more in-depth post. It’s not always the case, but deeper, more thoughtful takes on subjects often end up winning the day on Google.
- Figure out where their on-page content optimization is lacking, and improve on it.
- See how many links that page has to it, and the quality of those links. If their link profile is…
