How to Come Up with Content Ideas Part 1.

Introduction:

You probably have heard the saying “content is king” in today’s digital age this saying has never been more relevant. For a lot of small businesses owners coming up with engaging content ideas can be difficult and time consuming. In this set of blog posts will give you some tips and tricks that I have used as a professional digital marketer to speed up the process of coming up with content ideas and publishing this content for my target audience. Content creation is like any routine or habit the more consistency you have in creating regular content, the easier and quicker it will become.

At the end of the day the more content you have created for your business the more relevant and more authority you will have associated with your brand. You may not enjoy coming up with content ideas, it can be very frustrating and time consuming if done incorrectly but hopefully through reading this blog you will feel rejuvenated and come up with lots of fresh ideas for your content. These techniques work for several different types of content ranging from social media and website blogs to more traditional forms of media like TV and print advertising.

I want you to experiment with these content idea generation techniques and see what works best for your business and your industry.

Repurpose/Update Old Content.

One of the simplest and quickest way to come up with more content ideas is to repurpose existing content you have previously created. A common mistake a lot of businesses do is they put a lot of effort into creating pieces of content and think their job is done once they hit publish or post. This is not the case. What you should be doing is repurposing this content into new and interesting pieces of engaging content. An example of this would be taking a piece of blog content and turn it into an infographic for social media. Say you are an estate agent and created a blog post about average house prices in a neighbourhood over the past few years, you can take the average house prices and create a one-page infographic that tells readers all this information at a single glance. This infographic can be then posted on different social media platforms with different captions that are relevant to that platform. You have now taken one piece of old content being the blog post and turned it into a possible 5-6 different pieces of content that is shared on social media platforms.

After repurposing old content, the best thing, you can do is to update it to be relevant to the present. Google prefers websites that have webpages that have existed online for a longer period over websites that have a lot of new pages that are only a few weeks old. Google will give a higher priority to these webpages that have existed for longer. A perfect example of this is Wikipedia, they are always updating their existing webpages with the most up to date content rather than creating a new page every time there is a needed update. This have given Wikipedia a massive amount of authority from Google and is why you’ll see a Wikipedia entry for most of your searches on Google.

So how does this help your business? I would recommend twice a year, go through all your existing content on your website and updating it to be relevant to the present. This doesn’t have to be thousands of extra words but just add some relevant information that keeps your content fresh and encourages more people to read it.

Updating and repurposing content is a simple and effective way for any business to come up with more content ideas as you build off your previous knowledge and expertise. The more often you repurpose original content for different platforms the easier it gets and in the future, you will be able to make multiple extra pieces of content from one single main piece of content.