If you’ve been following the Great Leap Studios blog over the past two weeks, which I’m sure that you have since everyone in the world has been following this blog, you’ve probably seen our series of posts with examples of different content ideas for different industries.
We’ve been providing lists of content ideas for antique stores, car dealers, accountants, pest control, carpet cleaners and more, with the intention of ensuring your equipped with a variety of good ideas for your blog or website. But if you’re an industry we haven’t yet featured, or one we forget to feature in the future, here are a few semi-cheating ways to get ideas for your website.
Places to Find Blog Post Ideas
- Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers is kind of awful. Most of the questions are common sense or desperate for attention, and most of the answers are incorrect, spam, or jokes. Few people gain real value from Yahoo Answers, but as a content writer they can be a gold mind for understanding what people are looking for. Yahoo Answers is filled with questions, and each question represents something that someone else in the world wants answered. That means that if you can write a blog post that represents an answer for that question, there are going to be people in this world that are searching for it.
Don’t ever address Yahoo Answers directly, because you don’t want to admit you took your article idea from there, but it can be a good place for a cheap content idea search, and you may find several questions that spark ideas for you.
- EzineArticles.com
Ezine used to be the most popular place to do article marketing and generate incoming links. These days, Google tends to ignore many of them. Every once in a while it’s nice to stick an article on there for link building or to target a tough keyword, but it’s mostly fallen out of favor.
Still, many people continue to post to Ezine every day, and there are almost a decade worth of articles already on the site, and these articles can provide great ideas for your content. Do a search on eZine for your industry and see if any of the topics that come up sound like they’d be good ideas for your posts. You’ll want to write better than most of the people on Ezine, but it’s still a decent place for blog post ideas.
- Competitor Blogs
Of course, the easiest way to get content ideas is to check out what your competitors are doing and try to do it better. You never want to plagiarize, and you never want to write worse than they do because their content will be better rewarded. But if you have quality content writers and you’re willing to put in extra research and your own original ideas, competitor blogs are at the very least a good way to come up with basic topics, and then you can try to go into more depth to “beat” them.
More is Better
With content, you really do want to invest in as many good ideas as you can, and write up as many posts as you can afford. The more you create, the better opportunity you’ll have to compete. While you should try your best to come up with ideas on your own to ensure that you’re making unique content, those three strategies can help you find fast content ideas for your business.
