11. Content Ideas: YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google. It’s a great place to find videos from your industry.
This is going to be a big deal for you if you are in a niche where the audience likes to consume their content in a video format.
Don’t just look for videos with the most views.
A better option is often to look for videos that have a high ‘like to dislike’ ratio.
Read the comments and try to get an understanding of what your audience is thinking.
12. Content Ideas: Instagram
By now you know the drill. Look for the most popular content in your niche and read the comments.
Look for the influencers in your niche and look at the questions from their followers. Any unanswered questions represent an opportunity for you.
13. Content Ideas: Interviews
If you’re just getting started it will be difficult to convince a major influencer in your niche to agree to an interview.
However, there are always other people like you that are just getting started.
Look around and find other smaller players in your niche that are not direct competitors and seem to be credible. Contact them and offer to interview each other for each other’s blogs.
If you both have some credibility and are capable of providing high-quality answers to important questions in the interview, this can be a great way to help each other out without spending any money at all.
14. Content Ideas: Roundups
A roundup is a piece of content that includes small segments of content from multiple places.
It could be a summary of different ways to do one thing.
Or maybe you can convince 10 influencers to answer one question and then publish the 10 answers.
15. Content Ideas: Roundups (internal)
In this case, content from the roundup will come from your own previous content.
16. Content Ideas: Surveys
If you have customers then, at some point in time, you need to communicate with them.
Surveys are a great way to communicate because you can get a lot of customers to answer the exact same questions.
If you want them to answer a lot of questions then you need to make sure that there’s something in it for them – like some kind of discount or a special offer.
Otherwise, try to limit your survey questions to no more than three questions that have multiple choice answers.
You should assume that people will only respond to surveys if they think they can finish them in less than 60 seconds.
17. Content Ideas: Your Website Comments
If you already have some traffic the easiest way to understand how your audience feels about your content is to just look at the comments.
If you have a lot of visitors but you have no comments it likely means that your content isn’t very interesting to them.
If you do have comments, look for the questions.
It may be frustrating to see the same questions coming up again and again, especially if you think that you’ve addressed them in the article or in previous articles.
But this is where you have to remember that the customer is always right and go to even more effort to explain whatever it is they’re asking about.
You can add this extra information to your FAQs, and new blog posts or include it in email marketing campaigns.
If your audience sees you solving the problem your credibility in their eyes moves up one notch and they’re much more likely to buy something from you in the future.
18. Content Ideas: FAQ Sections On Your Website
Following on from the previous point, look at the questions that show up in the comments section of your blog Posts and your contact form, and make sure that you’ve included the most common questions in your FAQs.
In the meantime, if some of the questions in your FAQs justify a more detailed explanation, put the detailed explanation into a blog post and link to it from the FAQ.
19. Content Ideas: FAQ’s On Your Competitors Websites
Compare your FAQs with your competitors and top up your own FAQs with anything from your competitors that you think will be relevant to your audience.
Again, if the answer to any of the FAQs requires a more detailed explanation, go ahead and write a blog post and link to it from the FAQ.
20. Content Ideas: Q & A Sessions With Experts
Whenever an expert in your niche decides to do a Q&A you should attend. It will allow you to see the most common questions and how the expert answers them.
Think about how you would answer the same questions.
If you can provide a better answer, go ahead and write a blog post about it then go to the social media page of the expert and politely offer a link to the expert or the expert’s followers.
21. Content Ideas: Conference Agendas
Every industry has conferences and the organizers usually do a good job of identifying the most important issues in the industry.
22. Content Ideas: Roundtable Discussions
Roundtables usually involve multiple experts so this is an opportunity to listen to multiple questions but it’s also an opportunity to listen to answers to each question from multiple experts.
Again, how would you answer the questions?
23. Content Ideas: Customer Service Representatives
If you have an existing business and you have customer service reps then you have access to a lot of valuable information about your customers at every stage of the sales sequence.
If your customer service reps are talking to your customers then you need to be talking to your customer service reps.
Alternatively, you can use software that records customer service calls.
This is usually the best option because it allows you to listen in on calls and form your own impression of what the customer really wants – without anything getting lost in translation.
24. Content Ideas: Google Auto Suggest
You’ll notice that when you start searching for something in Google it will try to help you with its auto suggest feature.
Sometimes the alternatives that it suggests are useless but most of them reflect your audience’s search behavior.
25. Content Ideas: Google Related Searches
At the bottom of the search results you’ll see a section that includes related searches.
This is different from the auto suggest because the auto suggest uses the first 1 or 2 keywords that you type as the basis for its suggestion.
The Related searches may not start with the same keywords. That’s why they’re different.
26. Content Ideas: Google Alerts
You can set up Google alerts for any keyword and it will send you links to new articles relating to the keyword.
Keep in mind that a popular keyword could result in flooding your email box so you’ll need to experiment with the settings to get what you need without being inundated.