I’m going to walk you through a list of 26 sources of content ideas that can be used for any kind of content.

 

In most cases you should be looking for content that helps your audience solve a problem.

 

If you’re using content as part of a broader strategy to sell products or services, you should be looking for content that naturally leads to the sale of those products and services.

 

If you’re just getting started, you also need to keep in mind that your content will have a big impact on the impression that people have of you and your business for the obvious reason that they have nothing else to work with.

 

 

One of the first places that you should go is general forums like Quora. This is a simple question-and-answer forum that covers literally every subject.

 

Just enter a subject that relates to your niche and you’ll find a lot of questions and answers.

 

As a result of this being a general forum a lot of the questions are from people that have very little knowledge of the subject matter, they’re asking about.

 

So this is a great place for you to get an understanding of the problems that beginners in your niche want to solve.

 

 

A lot of these forums might seem very old-school but they are still very popular. You can find them by searching Google for forums in your niche.

 

This is a good place to go to see the most common topics of discussion in your niche.

 

These forums usually include people that are beginners, intermediate and advanced.

 

Social media groups are like forums that focus on one niche except that they operate within the framework of a social media platform.

 

As usual, look for forums that have a lot of genuine questions and answers

 

Almost every industry or niche has a magazine or some other kind of industry publication.

 

They focus on publishing the latest news, trends, tips, and anything else that’s going on in that industry.

 

In this case, look for the articles that have the most engagement. They will have the largest number of comments, shares, or views.

 

A lot of industry publications allow comments. Given that it’s impossible for one article to explain literally everything referenced in the article it’s common to find people asking questions in the comments.

 

It’s likely that these people read this article because they were hoping it would solve a problem but it ended up only partially solving the problem.

 

This gives you the opportunity to create content that completely solves the problem.

 

If you find content that you think is interesting you should go ahead and share it with the people that follow you on social media.

 

You can review their reactions to the content and figure out whether they think it’s as useful or as important as you think it is.

 

This should be an ongoing strategy that will allows you, overtime, to get an instinctive feel for what your audience is really interested in and what point of view they have about everything in your niche.

 

If your social media following is small you can use hashtags to get an understanding of what’s going on in your niche.

 

Again, look for the most popular articles and posts and think about what kind of content you can create to trigger a similar response.

 

Identify the influencers in your industry and follow them and watch how other people interact with those influencers.

 

People often ask them questions but it’s impossible for influencers with large followings to respond to everybody so this opens up opportunity for you.

 

Most influencers have used some kind of process of trial and error over a long period of time to figure out which content is most interesting to their audience.

 

At some point in time you’ll need to do the same and create some kind of unique version of your industry’s content for your audience but if you’re just getting started just use the content of the influencers as a guide for what you should be doing.

 

Slideshare is part of LinkedIn and it’s an extremely popular site. It includes slide presentations for almost every subject in every industry.

 

If you’re already up and running you should add your own slide presentations and if you getting started this is a great place to get content ideas.

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

In this case, content from the roundup will come from your own previous content.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Every industry has conferences and the organizers usually do a good job of identifying the most important issues in the industry.

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

Check out this guide about how to do customer research and this guide about how to do competitor research (and complete a competitive analysis) so that you can develop a unique selling proposition.

 

People need to be clear about why they should buy from you and not your competitor.

After attracting your target market to your website you will need to make sure that you have created an effective funnel and addressed all of the website trust required to maximize conversions.