IdeaAs a small business owner or an online marketing professional, you have the best of intentions when it comes to creating fresh new content for yours or your client’s website. The only problem is that you run out of ideas after a month or two and abandon blogging or updating the website altogether. However, you don’t have to stop posting just because your creative juices stop flowing. Content Runner offers some simple tools that will keep the ideas coming indefinitely.

Head Over to Our Idea Engine

We offer the Idea Engine to our clients to help them come up with new topic ideas. After navigating to the page, type in a keyword or a two-word key phrase and then hit the Suggest Ideas button. This will return two different results.

On the left is a list of popular search queries. This lets you know the top phrases that people are entering into Google’s search engine to find information related to what you or your client are offering. You can instantly see the number of recent searches as well as the cost per click for a campaign on Google Ad Words. This not only gives you topic ideas, it also allows you to plan for search terms you may want to incorporate into your article or post.

Just to the right of the popular search queries results is a list of relevant Twitter results about your topic. By entering only one or two words, you can see the most recent 15 tweets that anyone has posted about your area of interest. Since the tweets come up in order of the most recently posted, you can rerun the same search any time to get entirely different results. We recommended clicking through some of the tweets and then to the articles posted in them. Reading the articles can help you formulate your own ideas better, especially those that contain reader feedback.

Other Brainstorming Ideas

Before starting any brainstorming session, it’s important to decide on one central location for your content. Whether that’s a file on your computer, Dropbox, or your own project software isn’t as important as deciding on one place where it all goes. In our last post, we talked about creating your first content calendar. Since you’re a pro at doing that now, you should understand the importance of transferring content ideas to your calendar once you have a sufficient amount to work with.

Now that those details are out of the way, it’s time for the fun part. Here’s where you get to create all kinds of ideas for topics to cover on yours or your client’s website. When you think of it with this mindset, as in you get to do this rather than you have to do this, the process will be more fun.

First, consider common questions that current and potential customers tend to ask. You can even consult your own Frequently Asked Questions page if nothing comes to mind right away. In most cases, answering a common question could easily turn into a blog post. Your FAQ section only gives website viewers a brief answer, but a blog post goes more in-depth what they really want to know.

In addition to using our Idea Engine to see what’s trending on Twitter, you should also closely monitor your other social media accounts. You may even want to consider investing in a product like Sendible that tracks certain keywords and phrases on your social media accounts and delivers the results to you at regular intervals. Of course, this shouldn’t replace regular interactions with your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and people who take the time to keep up with your company on other social media sites. This way you are always in the know about the things that matter to the people you want to reach.

One last thing that we can recommend is to pay attention to electronic and print publications in your field of expertise. While many of them are geared towards professionals and not end users, you can glean valuable information about your industry that would be of interest your customer base.

When All Else Fails, Hire a Content Runner Writer to Create a Topic List for You

One of the major benefits of using the Content Runner platform for both writers and users is the flexibility it provides. You aren’t limited to strictly ordering articles using topic ideas you have generated yourself. When you’re truly stuck for titles and what to write about, consider hiring one of our freelance writers to do it for you. You are free to create an order requesting a list of topic ideas or article titles rather than the article itself. If you like what the writer generates, you can always contact him or her in her the future to write the actual posts.

Content Runner recommends including detailed instructions about your expectations in addition to creating only one order for all of the topic ideas that you need. You are free to set your own price for the entire order as well rather than having to upload and price each individual topic idea.

We hope this gives you some new ideas to consider the next time the question “What should we write about today?” comes up. Please contact the staff at Content Runner if you need additional guidance about topic generation or help with placing your first order.