Q/A Sites
Q/A sites are one of the best places to find great content ideas. Just think about it, this is the place where people go to find out things that interest them, so you are bound to find a few questions that will be of great interest to your readers. Since these questions are already asked that means that people want to know about them. It is very easy to see why Q/A sites are great places to fish for ideas, find something that people want and then deliver on the topic.
Social Networks
Social networks are similar to Q/A sites. People post opinions, ideas, questions, all in one. Sure this can be a great place to find ideas, depending on your niche you may have more options than others, but for each niche this can work great. For Facebook you can always visit business pages, people tend to ask a fair bit of questions on the active ones. For Google+, well if you are in SEO/IM/SMO or anything alike, this is the best place to go idea fishing. And Twitter… well anything you want you can find on Twitter, people ask, people talk, identifying a popular topic way before Google sees it is easy, so you can use that. And never forget LinkedIn, this platform has a great deals of though leaders that inspired me to write some posts only based on a two line ideas some of them have.
News Sites
News are always a good thing to write about, but covering news is not the only good thing that comes from following news sites for your market, you can also cover news from your own perspective. With SEO as the topic that goes perfect, every time Google updates something you can see plenty of SEO’s speculating as to what impact we can see in the future and how we should go with it. This approach can be used for a large specter of topics, so don’t skip it, or in the end just be one of the first to cover some news and you will get some traffic. Also, you can use regular TV news to find ideas for content.
Google Alerts
Now this is a no brainer, whenever I start a new blog I setup a few alerts surrounding my niche so I can stay on top of the game. This is a valid practice all of you should use, it’s easy, doesn’t require research or search, just setup the alerts and follow up on anything of interest you find, you can learn a lot about your market by using this nifty feature Google provides.
Forums
Forums have seen a slight downgrade each year following the expansion of social media, but in some cases that only helped us get rid of the spammers and some of the forums are run by the tough leaders in our industry. I still use forums and I found some amazing questions, and suggestions that always inspire me to find out more about a certain topic and even write about it, so don’t skip this content idea dinosaur and its infinite wisdom.
Of course there are more places you can go to find ideas for your content; you can get ideas from friends, co-workers, events, videos, slides, trends or search suggestions, we all have our sources, these are just some of the favorites I like to use. If you have some more cool places to dig up content ideas please share them in the comments.
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