How to find ideas for your content
Continuous fresh content is essential in maintaining a high ranking in search engine results, but where, exactly, do you find the ideas for it? It’s hard enough finding the words to fill the space you need, but finding the information to drive good, continuous, interesting content can seem like an impossible task.
Partially, the sources of ideas for content will depend on you and your writing style. If you lean toward technical and informative articles or blog posts, your writing will depend on the research you do. If you enjoy posting news about your company, your content will flow from the things you do. Either way, you will have periods when the words dry up.
A great source of content topics is client questions. Not only does answering a client question serve a practical purpose, it informs your clients that you are listening to them and want to engage with them. By communicating in this way, you can increase your return traffic and create a community around your site.
Even if your content tends to focus on news of your business, research is key. Read up regularly on news in your industry, and make a note of anything that interests you. The more interested you yourself are in your topic, the more likely it is that your viewers will catch your enthusiasm.
Subscribe to a few blogs that are relevant to your business. Blogs are a great way to keep in touch with timely topics. Better still, if you post your content through your own blog, subscribing to and commenting on other blogs is a great way to attract traffic to your own.
To find topical content ideas, look at some of the social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Technorati, or the popular topics search on Twitter.
Finally, there is the good, old-fashioned method of brainstorming on paper. This is good for sourcing a number of ideas that will fit your keywords. Grab a piece of paper, write your main keywords in the middle and tease out ideas by writing down related concepts. To make the actual writing easier, write down three or four subject areas for each of these ideas as a sort of mini-structure for when you come to write the content.
If you have your comments system open, it’s even more important to post topical content. Putting fresh and timely information can drive discussions on your comments system, meaning that even more fresh content is being posted to your site. Busy comments section discussions also opens up the opportunity for your keywords to be spread throughout natural conversations.
You may not have the time or the inclination to provide all of your new content, and there are plenty of options out there if you want to outsource. A good consultancy, like SEO Consult, should give you the option of purchasing keyword-rich, well-written content that is relevant to your site. Outsourcing through SEO Consult also ensures that your new content is in line with your overall search engine optimisation strategy.
If you choose to outsource through other avenues, always double-check that the content you are about to post is original and unique. Content gets posted and re-hashed endlessly all over the net, and even well-intending writers can accidentally copy parts of another text. There are several tools available for content checking that you can use.
