We’ve all heard about the importance of content and how success is contingent upon something that people actually want to link to, but just how does one come up with an idea?

Well, victory lies in preparation – and this preparation involves brainstorming a variety of content concepts. In this article, I’ll go into some tactices that go into successfully brainstorming a concept and form it into meaningful content your readers will find informative to support your content strategy.

A Storied History

Coming up with a series of ideas that can be developed and dissected further to engage and connect with your audience is the main goal here, but how can this be achieved? The answer is the idea of storytelling. Start your brainstorming off by coming up with stories and a general direction of where you want to go with your content idea and start putting out the meaningful content your audience will enjoy.

Competitors

This concept seems like a no-brainer, but it is a really important concept that some don’t engage in. Take a look at what your competitors have as content – assets of value – anything substantive. Do the research and find out if your competitors are outperforming you based on the content they put out.

Ideas in Other Industries

A great way of coming up with content ideas is paying attention to what’s going on in other industries. Sure, knowing what’s going on in your industry is important, but taking a break and looking at what is working in other industries is a great way to take in fresh ideas that you can adapt for your own content. Get a feel for what makes that piece of content successful. After you’ve identified what makes it solid content, compare it to what you would normally write out and see if those elements are present in your piece.

A Thorough Record

Keeping track of your ideas is a metric-driven approach to analyzing what works and what doesn’t. Each time an idea for content pops in your head, writing it down can make a huge difference – and I mean huge! Understand that there isn’t a such thing as a bad idea, just bad timing. What I mean by that is an idea for content might not work at the time you come up with it, but it might be a solid idea for the future. Keep track of your ideas on a spreadsheet so you can easily go back and pick up where you left off.

Utilize Online Tools

There are a plethora of online tools out there to help you do your research on what topics are being consumed and shared across social media, giving you a better gauge to what might make your audience respond better. One of these tools is BuzzSumo. This tool allows you to search for content out there relevant to an idea topic or keywords and serves you the results based on how it’s viewed and how popular on social media it is.

The Audience Matters

The key to content is what matters to the audience. Basing your ideas for content isn’t just about all that keyword research you did. Take the time to understand what your audience wants to read about

  • Industry News Topics
  • What’s making the rounds on social media
  • What is going around the journalism circle

Successful content is successful because it connects to the readers and evokes some sort of emotional investment into the piece. Spend time researching your target audience – read what they are reading. Look for recurring topics and themes. Write your content with that in mind.

Conclusion

When coming up with ideas for content goes stale, these are a few tips that might enable you to produce the fresh content your audience will respond well to. Using new techniques and trying a new approach to content is never a bad idea, so get out there and get to writing meaningful content!

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