5 Tools To Get Content Ideas For Your Blog
Posted at 7:16 am on May 10, 2015
We talk a lot about efficient content management. But the first stage in any content workflow is going to be content creation. So how do you deal with the days when you have writers block, or just can’t think of anything good to write about? Here are our 5 favourite tools that we use to develop our content ideas:
- Feedly/ RSS feeds – An RSS feed allows you to follow your favourite blogs all in one convenient place. Feedly is our favourite RSS reader. Following blogs that inspire you and provide valuable resources for your industry helps you create content on your own. Maybe you have a unique perspective on a topic that an influencer in your community has written about. Or maybe you came across some great facts and statistics to back up your blog post ideas. Following blogs to which you aspire, is a great way to get content ideas.
- Crowdsourcing – Reaching out to your friends, co-workers, and networks for content they would like to see. You can use a platform to organise ideas, attend networking events, or reach out to your contacts by email or social media.
- Quora – Quora lets users ask questions about any topic ever. Browse the feeds related to your blog, and get valuable insights into your potential readers. Learn what challenges and problems your community members are facing and write blog posts to solve it for them. What questions do they have? What answers and valuable information can you give to them?
- Social Media Lists – Social media platforms like Twitter and Google +, allow you to organise lists of your followers or interesting people on the platform. You can organise your lists by topic and add interesting and influential users. Once you have your lists created you can check in daily to find out what people are talking about in your community. We like using Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) to monitor social media lists and feeds.
- Trello – We hope you’ve set up an editorial workflow and have an awesome content marketing team! But we are betting you also have other members of your organization who are passionate about your work and the topics you write about. Trello let’s everyone create and contribute to ‘boards’. This can be used to assign ‘to-do’ actions and also to brainstorm ideas for blog posts. Get your whole team engaged and ask everyone to contribute their ideas!
What tools do you use to create content? Anything you would add to the list?