How to Come Up with New Content Ideas [Video]

Thinking up new content ideas is one of the things content creators spend the most time on. Wouldn't it be nice to have a ready supply of topics to draw inspiration from? It is also an effective route to growing organic traffic on the SEO side.

In this piece you will learn a set of shortcuts for producing new content ideas quickly. Apply them consistently and collect the results in a spreadsheet — you will end up with more inspiration and more time.

1 — Study the FAQ pages in your industry

This is a great way to learn what your potential customers ask and what they care about. Pick a target keyword for your industry and search Google for:

inurl:faq [keyword]

Open the FAQ pages of the sites that rank, and get to know your customers better.

Using those questions in blog posts and guides turns your website into a genuine resource for your customers.

2 — Visualise your topics with AnswerThePublic.com

With AnswerThePublic you can pour your content ideas into templates and enrich them. If you have been using Google autocomplete for topic research, you will immediately see how much time this tool saves.

It breaks your keyword down into the most common questions and prepositions and presents visual maps of those phrases, so you have far more to draw on.

The tool can also produce alphabetical keyword lists, and you can download everything either as an image or as a spreadsheet.

3 — Let Pinterest steer your content

Although Pinterest does not represent your audience demographically, its visual results can be a great source of ideas.

Pinterest also suggests more keywords related to your content, which helps you narrow the results down.

4 — Find the most-shared content on social networks with BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an excellent tool for finding topics that get attention in your industry.

Search your keyword and you can see what people share most. You can also discover the most-shared URLs of the leading companies in your sector.

5 — Mine Quora questions for more content ideas

Quora is a huge question-and-answer platform and a very valuable source of content ideas. Because both the questions and the answers are written by users, you get to know your audience better. I would suggest researching there for your longer-tail keywords or category content rather than for generic terms.

With Quora's filtering options you can reach not only questions but also topics and blog posts.

6 — See your competitors' highest-traffic pages with SEMrush

If you want to reach the pages that bring your competitors the most traffic, SEMrush does exactly that.

To generate, audit and improve ideas for your own content, study your competitors' high-performing pages and feed what you learn into your own content strategy.

These methods will let you build your list of content ideas in far less time. If you know of sources worth adding to this list, share them in a comment.