Content is king, as you might already know. It’s what drives traffic to your blog. It’s what creates value. And it’s what gets your blog into the first page of Google search results. Content is king, which means it’s very important. And that’s where the problem lies.
Sooner or later, every content creator comes to a point where there are simply no topics to write about. Well, there are, but none of them seem to be coming into the mind of the weary writer. Or even worse, the ideas that are coming into the writer’s mind come with a baggage of insecurity and doubt – are they good enough? Will they get enough shares and likes?
Those are the times when it’s useful to have a crutch, a go-to thing that could magically spark the creativity in the writer and get things going. And those kinds of crutches exist, although we don’t like to call them that. They are techniques for gathering ideas, and they should be adopted by the writer instead of being used in crisis situations. That’s how crisis situations are avoided. So here it goes.
Where to Look
There are two major sources you need to monitor constantly. One of them is social media, and the other is blogs in the same niche you’re writing in. Social media and blogs will provide you with a wealth of inspiration and information you can use to craft your content. Take the time to go over social media posts that deal with things of interest to your writing, but also try to cast a wide net from time to time, because you never know what interesting things you might catch.
What to Look For
You’re looking for anything and everything that might tickle your brain. If you want to be specific, however, you are looking for news and user-generated content. These two provide a wealth of ideas and information you can easily use to kick-start a great blog post. Here’s how to do it. Look through the comment sections of the blogs you keep track of. See if there is anything the posts on the blog are lacking, according to the comments. This will not only give you an idea for a topic, but it will also give you an idea of what topics are important for an audience that’s similar to yours. As for the news, anything new that happens in your niche has the potential to be crafted into a great piece of content.
How to Get the Most out of Your Creativity
It’s common knowledge that creativity is all about having inspiration strike you like lightning and then furiously creating masterpiece after masterpiece. In reality, creativity is a process in which you listen to yourself, gather information, develop a strategy, develop a draft, try and fail until you get it right. However, that doesn’t mean you can completely disregard those lightning strikes because they will happen from time to time, and you need to be ready for them. Always be prepared to quickly pen down any ideas that might suddenly pop into your head.
How to Use Content to Create Content
Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that one idea can give birth to another. Look at successful posts on blogs other than your own and use them as inspiration. Use the same title, reformulate it, and then write a completely different article. You can use your old content which was well received by your audience and write an update to it. Or, you can mix things up and create an infographic for it. There’s nothing wrong with recycling old quality ideas, as long as you don’t base your entire blog on it.
You can also use your skills to make unexciting content exciting. There are case studies, white papers, and reports that contain great information, but simply lack the sexiness to attract readers. But that’s where you come in, the person who takes what’s good from the boring content and adds to it something that will bring it closer to the reader. You can use a human interest story to illustrate a particularly boring study and give it a hook that will catch readers. You can, as mentioned before, use creative infographics to make the content they represent more appealing to the audience.
Whatever you do, remember that if it’s interesting, people will not waste their time on it. So do your best to keep every piece of content you publish interesting, and make it your mission to come up with a decent idea every day. Soon, you’ll be a content-producing machine, and your audience will know how to reward that.
