You know you should be creating lots of content on a regular basis, but sometimes it’s hard to come up with fresh ideas. When you’re stuck in a rut and don’t know what to write about, try one (or several) of these creative brainstorming hacks.
Look Through Your Emails
Start by looking through your recent email conversations. Chances are that a client or customer asked you a great question or you shared a tip with someone. Use the email exchange as the start of your blog post. Copy and paste it right into your WordPress post. Not having a blank page in front of you is sometimes all it takes to get going.
Save emails that you think will make good future content starters in a folder. They’ll be waiting for you anytime you need a fresh idea.
Look At Comments And Social Media Posts
A similar idea is to look at comments you’ve gotten on your blog or on your social media posts. Does something spark an idea there? Both of these are great places to start conversations with your target audience. Take what you’ve started there and expand on the idea in a blog post.
If you’d like link back to the social media post or the blog post where the comment first appeared to drive traffic to either place. Not only are you getting content ideas, you’re also driving up engagement with your readers.
Keep An Eye On Industry News and Trends
Browse through your favorite industry or niche news sites and blogs and take note of any hot topics or trends. Use them as a starting point to share your point of view. How does this apply to you, your business, your products or your particular audience? How will this news or trend affect your customers and clients?
Not only do you get ideas that are current and interesting, your readers are more likely to share this type of content via social media.
The Table of Content Trick
Here’s a quick hack that never fails me. Look up a couple of books in your niche on Amazon. Look at the preview feature. You can usually see the table of content for the book. Use the topics you find there to inspire you to write blog posts, emails and short reports. Take one content heading and go from there. Each book you look at should easily give you 2 or 3 good topics to run with.
Spend 15 minutes browsing tables of content on Amazon and you should have a list of blog post topics to last you for the month. Go ahead and save them as drafts in WordPress and you’ve got everything you need to get your blogging done for the coming weeks.