3 AWESOME TOOLS THAT WILL GET YOU LOADS OF BLOG CONTENT IDEAS IN LESS THAN 3 MINUTES!
Content Marketing Ideas
Three Ways Of Coming Up With Fantastic Content Marketing Ideas In Three Minutes
For further clarification we’ve outlined the steps below so you get a really good grasp of the processes which will help you to come up with a solid content marketing plan.
Content Marketing It’s Not Hard- Ideas Are Hard
Most small businesses in the UK are now familiar with the concept of “content marketing” and content curation but not necessarily the term. In a nutshell, it’s just writing interesting and helpful stuff about your business that you think your potential customers will want to read. When we looked around the Internet for articles that were aimed at helping you with your content marketing, we found it was full of content aimed at the US and also generally quite large companies. So for the purposes of this article I have specifically aimed it at helping you as a UK-based small business (in this case a physiotherapy practice.)
Everything Is Interesting-when It Needs To Be
When we talk to our clients about content marketing (or even blogging) and social media marketing, often the first reaction is “who wants to know what I had for lunch last week?”
It’s true nobody is interested in inane content, or technical explanations about what could be seen as your boring products or services………. Until they are.. An explanation of how a Samsung OLED TV compares to a Sony Experia 45 inch OLED TV on somebody’s hi-fi website blog is extremely boring when you’re not buying a TV but extremely helpful when you are.
Content Marketing Ideas
Suggestion Marketing (No Not That Kind)
I often find myself struggling for fresh content marketing ideas relevant to our business and helpful to our readers, perhaps you want to provide useful answers to common customer issues in your industry but don’t know where to start? It doesn’t matter what you are trying to create, with a little bit of lateral thinking you can come up with hundreds of content ideas in a seriously short period of time. In fact it’s laughably easy because there are websites that will do all the work for you (including Google)
All you have to do is type _s l o w l y_ and suggestions come out.
So as I mentioned before, let’s imagine we are a fictitious physiotherapy practice and see how you get on. In fact, trying to come up with industry related (and interesting) ideas on your own for this sector is pretty challenging. But for any business if you follow these three steps you’ll be ready to go in minutes.
Google Autocomplete
Perhaps the most obvious of the three, you have definitely seen this in action, and it has certainly affected your decision to visit one page over another at some point. For want of a better term this is a way of Google trying to be “helpful”… as you type.
Google autocomplete throws a range of popular options when you start to type, the results shown are not strictly based just on search volume but are actually a reflection of other users search activity, or the content of the webpages they visit.
In other words, in language that I can understand, the results are calculated both by search volume and suitability of the page it wants to show you.
It’s a powerful source of really easy research and a really quick way of getting a guide to how often Google users have typed in a key search term. As you can see from the example below it throws up plenty of suggestions so quickly.
Click to Enlarge (or go to full video at the TOP)
If you’re looking for quick blog ideas it can keep you going for ages, and is definitely my starting point when I’m feeling a bit uninspired. Remember, it is showing you keywords and phrases that get searched for a lot, so even if you don’t think the subject matter is interesting quite a few people do.
German Efficiency But Not German
Ubersuggest is one of the best suggestion generators around and really easy to use. You can spend 30 seconds and end up with mountains of ideas. All you have to do is enter your main keyword idea, select your location and you end up with tons of different great suggestions which can lead to excellent blog ideas. It is unbelievably quick and provides great results.
Basically what it does is it mimics Google autocomplete but then adds every letter of the alphabet to the end and scrapes those results as well! Then all you have to do is press the green “plus” symbol and they are added to a list for you to keep.
So starting from a really broad suggestion you can rapidly harvest loads of different variations for your subject, sometimes it can throw strange anomalies which can set you thinking on a different path but often this can lead to pure content gold.
Last but by no means least
Keywordtool.io at first glance looks more difficult than the others, but its principal is exactly the same. Once again it “piggy backs” on Google Autocomplete in exactly the same way Ubersuggest does and also works through the entire alphabet and numeric characters, but it adds them to both the front and the back of your chosen key phrase. This provides a much deeper insight and the chance of some excellent angles very quickly.
Don’t forget to work your way down through the whole sheet looking for keywords that you feel, suit you and your writing style the most.
After that, you have the choice of copying them all, or just a few of the ones that suit. you the most.
By now you should have plenty to work through, but how do you know which ones are the most popular? Or the easiest to get traffic from?
Traffic (And Not A Jam In Sight)
There are many places you can go to get a good idea of keyword traffic, the easiest by far is the Google keyword planner-and it’s free. Putting a few of your keywords in at a time will give you the real idea of how many searches there are every month, and also how competitive the the word is.
The real diamond in the rough that you are looking for is a keyword that has a decent amount of searches, looks helpful in its intent and has a lower competition factor.
What you have now got is a pile of ideas for helpful content that people actually want to read, and your content marketing plan is sorted for the year. For any questions about this article, or even just for some free advice-give us a call.
Shane McEvoy is a seasoned SEO and inbound marketing expert with nearly 30 years of experience in advertising. He established Flycast Media, a specialist B2B digital agency, and is a published author of two well-received guides while contributing to several industry publications - read his complete profile here.
