Do you spend hours staring at a blank computer screen or piece of paper, desperately racking your brain for just one great content idea? Well, the sad reality is that you cannot afford to wait for inspiration to strike: your readers are waiting for yet another one of your great posts to enjoy and share.
This article is your reference for tips and tricks to find inspiration and create great content to grow your WordPress site.
We’ll cover the following topics:
- How to source inspiration directly from your readers
- How to get great topic ideas from your social media channels
- Useful tools you may already be using, but not as effectively
- How to overcome writer’s block
Know Your Readers and Their Concerns
This is arguably the starting point to creating great content: knowing your reader and their concerns.
To gain and maintain a steady stream of followers, you must produce consistently good content that your blog visitors are interested in. Since your content is ideally centered around the needs and interests of your readers, it is therefore very important to know who they are. But how would you know what your readers are interested in?
First, put yourself in your reader’s shoes. Then ask and answer the following questions:
- What issues do your readers struggle with most?
- What would better enable them to understand and solve those issues?
- What would a reader enter in search engines to find content in your niche?
Creating valuable content boils down to problem solving. You can start writing winning content more easily once you know what your readers are looking for and what their pain points are.
A key thing to remember, however, is that some of your readers may be beginners who are trying to come to grips with your subject area. So create content that is clear & appealing to beginners and which does not exclusively focus on advanced readers.
Look at Your Analytics
Your website analytics will provide you with a lot of insight regarding where your readers are coming from and how they’re interacting with your site. Check Google Analytics for keywords that users are searching for to get to your site, and then create engaging content about those topics.
You can also use those insights to update and keep existing posts relevant; or to create new posts with detailed information on the problems your target audience is trying to solve.
Go Through Your Blog Comments
Your blog comments can be extremely helpful to you in a number of ways.
First of all, they provide you with great insight into what readers think of the content you have written. This may include positive or negative feedback on the style and clarity of your writing, questions for more information on areas you can expand on, wide-spread problems being discussed and/or solutions to those problems.
Note them down and come up with post ideas to help your readers.
If your readers take the time to report a problem they are having, or to give you feedback, you need to listen. It usually means that it’s a significant challenge they, and other users, are facing.
Sift Through Your FAQs
You can actively engage with your readers by answering their most frequently asked questions in blog posts. This will show readers that you have carefully considered their responses to your content, and also helps other readers who may also have similar questions.
And as a nice bonus, you may attract some more visitors that wouldn’t have found your WordPress site otherwise.
Use Social Media
Social media channels are arguably the best place to source inspiration. Take BuzzFeed for example. They constantly browse the web for fun ideas – typically small trends or trending topics in niche areas – and make them more mainstream.
You can also use social media to stay on top of industry trends; and to monitor the new keywords created by these trends. Use tools like Google Trends, Twitter Trends, Reddit, etc. to keep up with the conversation and take it to your blog.
Questionnaires and Polls
Another useful way to engage with readers is to put out short surveys or polls on your blog, social media or your mailing list. Ask them any questions they may have or for their opinion on certain topics that you covered. This is also a fantastic way to keep them engaged with your content.
Make it clear to your mailing list that you welcome questions. One way to do this is to offer some sort of incentive: perhaps a product discount, a coupon, or free mentoring to anyone who is willing to give a short interview. Interviewing in particular is a great way to find out a host of questions or issues your audience may have with your topic or industry that may never have even crossed your mind. This strategy may seem daunting, but is an effective way of coming up with content that is higher quality and more relevant to your audience.
Recycle and Transform
The fastest way for you to generate content ideas is by reading through existing content and expanding and improving on it. This means looking though what your competitors are writing about, and using that as a beacon to light your own blog posts. It is about taking already existing material, not copying it, but using it as a starting point for your own inspiration.
An important thing to consistently keep in mind when expanding and improving existing material is to not limit yourself to the original piece; to consider what else readers would benefit from knowing. Perhaps you could make the piece more personal and relatable by referencing your personal experiences.
So how can you discover other content in your niche? Use tools such as Feedly which shows you a list of publications that have been produced about a certain topic. Once you create an account, you can simply enter in specific keywords, URLs, or browse through existing categories.
Read Every Day
Reading every day actually means reading something relevant to your niche every single day. By doing so, you will find that over time, not only will your knowledge of the subject matter improve substantially, but that new sources of inspiration will spring up as well.
Reading content written by others in your field and the comments left behind by their users is also a good way to find inspiration. When reading through other peoples content, you may notice that similar problems keep cropping up but have remained unanswered. You can subsequently try to answer those questions in depth and address those issues in your own blog.
Visit popular blogs and websites, and observe the different ways in which they operate. Pay close attention to their writing style, and the topics that they are covering. You will slowly begin to pick up fresh ideas, and gain exposure to different viewpoints.
Reading stimulates the brain, thus making it that much easier for you to generate great content ideas.
How to Tackle Writer’s Block
So you’ve found inspiration and are now struggling with writer’s block. One of the best techniques to overcome it is simply to write! Write something down every single day, no matter how small, or jumbled. The point is to get all your ideas down on paper, which you can later revise and expand on.
Keep your work well organized, and easy to refer back to. You can use online note applications such as Evernote or Google Docs to keep your work backed up and easily accessible.
Having something to start with makes that blank page much less intimidating.
In a Nutshell
Once you get started using these tips and tricks, you will find that generating good content ideas is not as difficult as it may have initially seemed. So we hope this post has helped you to find inspiration for your next engaging blog post. The truth is, you really never know when your next source of inspiration may strike, so best of luck to you!
Do you have any special tricks to come up with great content ideas? Share them with your fellow readers below in the comment section!
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Great post. This is very informative, this is very helpful for me especially still in early stage of growing my site.
Thank you for sharing your expertise.
I needed this. It was sort of a kick in the seat to cause me to get back to researching my reader’s needs. I, like others, have easy access to the tools you enumerate. I just need to use them. As an example, one of the top posts at my site is about gossips and how to deal with them. I can certainly refresh that. Another has to do with a quick summary of an unknown, but still important character. I can look for more of those ideas too.
Sometimes it is also a quest to discover exactly who your ‘tribe’ or market is! It is only through presenting different materials and experimenting with quite different approaches that you actually engage with different audiences.
This post struck a chord with me. Especially the part on reading everyday. Lately, I’ve been slacking off on keeping abreast with the latest stuff in my domain, I should try and keep up!
great post. This article will surely help me to write better content for my website. Especially it is useful for a new website which struggles with content ideas
Great post thanks a lot!
Great work. Thanks .
So very clear! Thanks for your sharing knowledge how to make great content.
In addition to that it will also help when you chose only simple themes a white and black appearance the purpose is that the reader would not difficult for him to navigate your site.
Your visitors love to read and continue to read and revisit it is because they found very helpful content for them and that start your site create traffic.
Great article…. Rest helps too..
This is great! I’m looking forward to utilizing these tips in my blog.
Looking at your analytics and finding long tail search terms to target is a good way to find new sources of traffic. Looking at your site search to find terms with zero matches is another way to identify content your readers are looking for. Google alerts on your keywords are also a great way to find newsworthy content.
Nice info.
Thanks for sharing. This post really helps for content ideas. Sometimes I feel no topic or contents has been left behind to write again.
Thanks for sharing the post. This is great info for content ideas.
Great post! I jotted down some ideas as I was reading it. The resources will come in handy too.
Awesome post, I just needed it and got it. Thanks.
Great post.
Harika bir içerik tebrik ederim. Sonuna kadar okuduk ve faydalanacağız.
You can know all these things and more, but persistency is the key. Thanks for keying in on the vitals, you presented all good advice.
Very useful and informative post…
Thanks to sharing us!!!!!
Who are your audience? A simple question but one which is often difficult to quantify. We can speak to many different types of people with the one blog/site. Being open to new ideas, and understanding the reach of our publication can reveal different opportunities to communicate!
Nice!
Good advice. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing this… great post!
Just starting to set up my blog on WA. Very useful information. Took copious notes. Thank you.
This is great stuff. It opens up a new way of dealing with SEO.
Thanks for the article, this is really helpful.
Do you have a social media list to submit articles?
Hi Zulian, I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean. I’ll be happy to help you if you’d explain your question to me in more detail.
I want to test your promotion strategies on my project as soon as possible. Thank you very much for sharing this type of content! Do you think these strategies will be relevant in 2020?
Yes, we believe these strategies are still very relevant.