How to get great content writing ideas every day
Content writing is an everyday activity.
No matter what is your content publishing schedule, if you continuously want to engage visitors on your website or blog and you also want to improve and maintain your search engine rankings, regular content writing and content publishing are some activities that you cannot avoid or brushed under the carpet.
The biggest problem faced by people who want to use quality content to improve their presence on the web is a lack of great content writing ideas.
What to write?
To understand this, you first must understand why quality content matters.
What do you want to publish content?
Of course, instinctively, you’re going to say, to improve your SEO.
This is understandable, and easy to relate to, but if you simply focus on SEO, or even simply on your business, you are not going to get anywhere.
You want to publish content to help people.
You want to write content because you want to offer something valuable, something people are looking for, and can use to solve problems and enrich themselves.
Even if you don’t want to make this world a better place through your writing, trying to help people is a self-serving activity, especially on the Internet.
The thing is, both your SEO and conversion rate depend on how people react to your content.
Both your SEO and conversion rate depend on how people interact with your content, how much time they spend going through it, how they share it, and how they engage with it.
Hence, if your content is not appealing, nobody is going to care.
You may say, who cares, as long as my SEO improves?
Well, Google cares.
If people don’t find your content valuable, Google is spending millions of dollars in research precisely to find whether people find your content valuable or not and if not, how to make sure that less people are able to find your content on the search engine.
They are a search company.
The most important thing Google wants to achieve is, find the information for its users that is valuable and useful.
So, yes, write and publish lousy content and bid goodbye to your hopes of improving your SEO.
Here is another interesting bit of information I found while researching for this blog post: the amount of data produced in the year 2017 was more than the data produced by the whole of humanity in the past 5000 years.
According to this Neil Patel blog post, only Huffington Post, in 2013, was publishing 16,000-2000 articles per day.
Just imagine how much content it must be posting now.
You can very well imagine how much data Google is processing on daily basis.
Amidst this deluge, you need to make your own presence felt.
I’m not telling you this to scare. Despite this humongous amount of data, businesses that publish quality content on an ongoing basis do manage to create a presence for themselves and increase their visibility on search engines.
Why getting good content writing ideas on regular basis is important?
Publish content regularly
Do you know Google has a “Query Deserves Freshness” algorithm?
According to this algorithm, publishing fresh content can improve your search engine rankings.
When a user conducts a query, when finding information based on the query, aside from quality and relevance, the Google algorithm also considers the freshness of your content.
This doesn’t mean freshness takes precedence over quality and relevance, it’s just that, if there are two blog posts of similar quality, the fresh blog post will be ranked higher than the older blog post.
As mentioned above, every time you publish something, you need to make sure that it is valuable.
Hence, you constantly need to come up with great content writing ideas that people will find useful.
Actually, when I say “regular basis” I don’t exactly mean every day.
Even if you don’t publish every day, this is fine.
But at least publish 10-15 times in a month.
How frequently you should publish depends on your competition.
It also depends on the status of your current rankings.
My advice to my clients is, in the beginning when your search engine presence is meager, publish as frequently as you can.
There are multiple reasons for that:
- You cover all possible topics in your realm.
- You write and publish authoritative content, increasing your authority in the process.
- You send signals to Google that you have got quality content that can be crawled, indexed and ranked.
- The greater is the frequency, the more Google bot visits your website or blog and consequently, your newer content will be crawled, indexed and ranked faster.
Once you have improved your search visibility, maybe you can focus on fewer, high-quality blog posts and articles.
But until that happens, you need to have some great content writing ideas.
Here is what you can do…
Use Google Alerts to monitor new content being published in your field
Google Alerts is a great tool.
Google is constantly crawling every possible piece of content and adding it to its database.
No tool can inform you of the latest content in your field faster than Google.
You can set Google Alerts to send you an email the moment someone publishes a blog post or an article or a web page on a topic concerning your business.
Google will send your way news alerts, blog post alerts, user forum updates alerts and sometimes even social media alerts.
Use Twitter hashtags to monitor conversations
Twitter hashtags are a great way of monitoring subject-specific conversations.
Suppose I want to know what people are talking about in the field of content marketing.
I can monitor the hashtag #contentmarketing.
Even if you’re not crazy about hashtags, you can simply search on Twitter about your field and the website will throw up lots of useful conversations.
Join LinkedIn Groups
The professional networking platform has many niche groups where professionals and experts are constantly exchanging useful information and insights with each other.
People ask questions and either moderators or other group members provide answers.
You can get many content writing ideas simply by going through the questions.
Use Quora to find useful topics
Quora is another great place where you will find great content writing ideas in the form of questions and answers.
In fact, Google prefers content in the form of questions and answers because most of the search engine users post questions.
Monitor content syndication and curation services
I regularly use Flipboard.
Sometimes I also use Feedly.
Then of course, I save lots of good ideas in my Getpocket account.
Even on Medium you can find very good content writing ideas.
Develop a system to maintain content writing ideas
No amount of research, hashtag tracking and communicating on various online forums is going to help you unless you have a system of preserving your content writing ideas.
I bounce from one app to another, or one system to another.
For a few years I used Evernote.
The Evernote plug-in allows you to save blog posts and articles from the browser itself.
Even if you don’t want to save complete blog posts, you can simply save the URLs. Or the text versions.
Then for a year I used OneNote but it proved to be a bit clunky and bulky.
I used Google Keep notes. I still use them.
These days I use Trello.
Use whatever works for you.
The more you think about a topic, the more content writing ideas you get.
How do I get regular content writing ideas for my clients?
Many of my clients like to do the job of finding new content writing ideas on their own because assigning me the task costs more.
Regularly coming up with great content writing ideas is sometimes difficult than writing complete blog posts on these ideas.
Nonetheless, when my clients want me to come up with great writing topics, aside from the methods mentioned above, I also study the client and customer persona and make a list of what all questions and queries they may have.
My entire focus is on giving them reasons to visit my client’s website or blog as regularly as possible.
For that, I try to come up with relevant and high quality blog post and web page ideas.
