Five ways to find content ideas for your clients or audience

The ideas for content well can quickly run dry. Especially if you have a number of clients or various audiences for your product.

There is nothing worse than a content plan for the sake of a content plan. Vague ideas that just don’t do anything for your targets.

You need to be providing the info your target audience is looking for. Doing this will help you be discovered, become an authority and grow your community, traffic and ultimately sales.

Below are five ways you can quickly find inspiration for content that your target audience is looking for👇

Answer the public

Go to Answerthepublic.com type in your topic, it will list out hundreds of questions that your audience is asking. Each one of these is a potential title. Also, great for SEO

Amazon Look inside

Go to Amazon, search for books in your niche/industry. Click ‘Look inside’ — go to the contents page. Right there are all the chapter titles. More inspiration for your next piece of content.

Niche Forums

The first thing you need to do is find the forums related to your niche. Use Google advanced search:
<subject/topic> forum e.g. Fishing forum

Once you have found a few forums you would like to target, you need to search through them to find the questions being asked. Use Google advanced search again :

site:forum.com help|advice|recommend|recommendations|problem|suggestions|how

In the above example, you have told Google to go to forum.com and look for any posts containing help, advice, recommend, recommendations, problems, suggestions and how. Go through the results and there are your next content ideas.

Google Image Tags

Load up Google and head over to Images.

In the search bar, add your broad topic. Once you click search, you will see a series of tags underneath. These are terms that Google considers related to the topic you just added. — based on other user searches.

You can go down a rabbit hole here, continually adding as you find tags. For instance :
carpenter: Tags returned: Construction, Framing, furniture
Next search: Carpenter furniture: Tags returned: Interior, Kitchen, Design
Next Search: Carpenter Furniture design: Tags returned: Sideboard, shelving, bench

The deeper you go, the more niche you get.

YouTube Content

Head over to YouTube and add the beginning of a question, using ‘how’, ‘why’ or ‘what’ in the search bar.

Youtube will auto-complete your question. Then when you click search you will see a number of videos with different headlines answering that question

Here’s an example :

I typed ‘how does meditation’ and had the following autocompletes :
- How does meditation work?
- How does meditation affect the brain?
- How does meditation help with anxiety?

You can use those as inspiration for your content, however, if you click on one of the autocompletes as mentioned above you will see various ways people have answered the question.

If you scroll a little more down you will see ‘People also watched’ and ‘Related searches’ for even more ideas. You can click on the related searches to go even deeper and repeat the process.

Using any one of these will give you a list of potential ideas for your blogs, podcasts and videos

By the way, these were taken from my book The Content Ideas Machine — there are another 30 ways in there. Check it out here.

This post was created with Typeshare