You’re sitting in front of your laptop ready to write the content for the day, but the content ideas are not coming—you’re blank. You take a little walk and come back, but nothing is clicking. Furthermore, you’re undergoing writer’s block. This can happen to anybody at any time, which is why it’s so important to generate content ideas and store the topics in your content bank. This reduces the cracking of the brain to get content ideas, but more than that, it makes your content a rhythm.
If you’re looking for a way to store valuable and relatable content, keep reading.

How to Generate Content Ideas

There are so many ways to generate content ideas, below are the best 10 that will always work for you.

1. Keyword Research

A keyword is a search phrase typed on Google. Keyword research is a process of trying to find out relevant keywords based on what your potential customers type on Google. This can give you an understanding of your audiences’ most pressing problems or interests.

To be successful with keyword research, there are a few important steps to take:

• Utilize tools such as SEMrush.
• Go to the search bar and type in your keyword.
• Click on get result and SEMrush returns the data to you.
• Scroll down to organic results, add SEMrush advanced filters to reduce the volume, and pick relevant keywords to your niche.
  
  Note: You can export this data and organize it later to have as many relevant keywords as possible.

2. Customer Research

Customer research is the process of gathering information about your potential customers. This helps you understand:

• Who your customers are.
• What they want.
• How they make decisions.

When you identify your potential customer’s challenges and frustrations, you can generate content ideas that address their problems and offer solutions.

3. Research Your Competitors

To run this research properly, you need to understand who your competitors are. Explore their website and the kind of content they put out.

The goal for this is to understand what your target audience need.
SEMrush is a great tool to analyze your competitors’ website. To do this:

• Copy the link to that page that popped up for your target keyword. Plug it into SEMrush, select your target location and click on search.
• It will pop up relevant information.
• Scroll down to the organic research and check out keywords that are relevant to you.
• Export the information to excel to easily get back to them whenever you need content ideas.
  You can also check out your competitor’s content, discover the gaps and create better content on relevant topics that your audience need.

4. Generate Content Ideas Using Google Auto Suggest

Google auto suggest has been found to be very useful when identifying keywords that your audience search for in real time.

To utilize this, begin typing a keyword slowly into the Google search box. Google will automatically suggest related keywords based on popular searches.

For instance, if you’re into the marketing niche, you can type in “lead generation” and Google will bring up suggestions like “lead generation tools” or “lead generation strategies”.

This gives you an insight on what your audience are searching on Google and you can create content around them providing solutions.

You can also scroll down to the bottom of your research page to find related keywords to your search query.

5. Leverage Question-Answer platforms

Explore platforms like Quora and Reddit, where people frequently asked questions.

Find questions related to your niche, add it to your content bank and create content around it later.

6. Subscribe to Industry Related Newsletters

Newsletters always provide updates on industry trends. Sign up to newsletters related to your niche. Go through the newsletters you receive and pick out relevant keywords that you can use to create contents.

This is a very good way to generate content ideas as these industries will send you emails depending on the frequency. Those emails are going to contain lots of content ideas that you can use for your business.

7. Conduct Interviews

If you’re passionate about putting out content relevant to your audience, then one of the best way to do that is conduct interviews.

This is a simple but less often used method of generating content ideas. It gives you first class insight into what your audience wants.

You can ask your audience what pain points they have or what solution they want by hopping on calls with them.

During the interview, it’s important to ask open-ended questions that will help you understand exactly what they want. It’s best to record these calls to listen to them again in order to note important points that you can use to generate content topics.

8. Generate Content Ideas by Reviewing Blog Comments

Blog comments have proven to be very helpful when trying to generate content ideas. For blogs, you can check out your blogs or those of your competitors to see what people say in the comment section. This also works in your social media comment section too.

When you see questions or ideas that your audience put out in the comment section, it helps you to understand how they think and what questions they need answers to.

This helps you to identify certain gaps and opportunities that you can use to put out content that resonates fully with your audience.

9. Analyze your Blog Posts

Your website analytics gives a detailed insight on which articles your audience has a lot of interest in within a particular time frame.

For instance, if your content on “how to generate content ideas for your business” received significant traffic, it shows that your audience has an issue with generating content ideas.

This insight can help you to effectively work on your content strategy and create other content related to generating ideas.

10. Share Personal Experiences

Storytelling is a good way to generate content ideas. It could be a success story or a story about a mistake you made in business.

Personal stories work because it gives your audience an insight on what they can imitate and what they should avoid, makes your content unique and forms a connection between you and your audience.

Conclusion

Writer’s block will always happen occasionally, but you don’t have to let that define how you run your business.

Having a content bank where you store all your generated content ideas gives you the opportunity to deliver relevant and valuable information to your audience.
Apply the steps above to fill up your content bank.

FAQ’s on How to Generate Content Ideas.

1. How do I know if I have enough content ideas for my business?

There is no yardstick for generating content ideas. Get as many as you can and store them in your content bank.

2. How do I know if a content idea is good?

A good content idea has to be relevant to your audience, compelling, and give them actionable tips they can implement quickly.

3. Why is content idea generation important?

Generating ideas for your content helps you put out content that resonates with your target audience, drives traffic to your website, and helps you achieve your marketing goals.