With much of SEO shifting to higher quality content and a move away from guest blogging, there is a need for content writers, webmasters, and marketers to understand what constitutes as great content and how to come up with great ideas.
If you find yourself just coming up with ideas that you haven’t already done in the past, then it’s time to reshift your content marketing strategy to make sure you’re hitting the right targets with messaging that makes sense.
Great content captures your audience’s attention, maintains interest to continue reading and creates desire that leads to action.
Whether you’re writing to get people to follow your blog, share your content on social media, visit a store, or buy anything, it’s critical to make sure you’re writing for your audience, not the sales department.
The Creativity Process
Coming up with great ideas for great content requires a fluid creative process that allows ideas to flow. First, you need to look at what your goal is. Build a larger audience? Sell a product? Increase traffic? Get people to book an appointment? Whatever your end goal is, understanding your audience and their mindset will help you better brainstorm content ideas that actually speak to them.
Take yourself inside the mind of your target audience, what is interesting to them? A great way to do this is to come up with a fictional person who embodies your target’s personality, goals, and interests.
People come online to read, shop, learn, and be entertained. Attracting an audience is more fruitful when they will learn something new, learn more about a particular subject, and the delivery is interesting and engaging. Hence, the importance for great ideas, not just ones you haven’t done.
Generating Great Ideas
The next part involves actually coming up with ideas. How often you should brainstorm depends on when your ideas are due but ideally, it is better to continually be on the lookout for interesting ideas that you can connect the dots on and expand into well-written content.
It’s recommended that before a brainstorming session, you put yourself and your team in a new environment in order to relax the mind and let ideas flow.
Sitting in the same office with the same environmental stresses makes it difficult for our minds to open up as there are the same distractions and alerts lingering about.
If you can’t take your team to a new place, then taking a walk together beforehand will ease the mind and some fresh air doesn’t hurt either.
Now, the ideas should stem from the decided goals and for the target audience. The strategy in the ideas that people come up with should be easy for everyone involved in the brainstorm to understand where they are coming from and the purpose in alignment with the strategy.
Make sure that the focus of the ideas is not to just bluntly sell things to people as people hate being sold to. The content should serve to educate, entertain, and encourage action. Take a look at long-tail keywords too to help you come up with ideas.
Types of Content
Once you have some great ideas, revisit what your goal and target is to make sure that the strategy still works. Would these ideas be interesting to your fictional character?
Why would they be interested in your products or services? Another thing to consider is if your audience’s age range varies greatly.
For example, a target at age 23 will have a different outlook on life and concerns than a target at age 53. It’s ok to split your idea into audience-centric ideas that will better cater to your audiences.
Ideally, the content that is written ought to be evergreen, content that is relevant months and years from now, so that you can make the most out of your work. However, it is also ok to tap into what’s trending and turn it into a piece of evergreen content.
Keep in mind that new customer and old customers will read your company’s content so try to avoid only writing to “experienced” customer or “newbies.”
If you have strong blogs that had a lot of traffic in the past but are rather old, then it’s worth refreshing them and putting them out as new content. Just remember to either put up a redirect from the old blog or a rel=canonical to direct link juice to the new blog.
What kind of things do you or your company do to come up with great and fresh ideas for content?