As a blogger, I’ve experienced the dreaded ‘idea drought’ a few times. You know how it is — You have run out of every idea to create useful content for your readers & you have a weekly deadline looming over your head. I know the feel.
While it’s great having an editorial calendar to manage your blogging and content marketing efforts, filling it up with amazing, useful post ideas is another ball game altogether.
Which is why I thought I’d share with all of you, some fantastic articles and resources to always keep that editorial calendar full and your blogging efforts on track.
This is a mammoth post by Carol Tice for CopyBlogger and touches upon some eye-opening tips on how to brainstorm for topic ideas. Few of my favourites from the list:
In this post, Heidi Cohen lists down 21 different types of content by ‘weight’ and explains how each content piece can be re-imagined in order to fill up your editorial calendar.
It’s great to see Heidi mention so many forms of content when so many marketers stick to just one or two types of content. Remember, diversity is key.
While this post by Kristi Hines, is a little outdated as it speaks of using Google Reader, it still has a treasure trove of information on combining various information sources in the RSS reader of your choice and using that to brainstorm topic ideas.
This is where I look for inspiration myself and it’s a great way not only to find useful topics to write about but also to catch up on some reading :)
In this post, Rick Allen outlines 7 fantastic ways to use web analytics to understand what your reader prefer to read. And what better way to think of new blog topics than to ‘listen’ to what your readers want.
The post is full of little nuggets that provide a way to use internal/external search, popular categories, comments and shares to decipher the types of content that do well. Basically the kind of content you need to keep writing about.
This post has Jayson Demers outline some of the more well known methods of finding topic ideas. That’s not to say this post isn’t useful. Jayson puts forth useful tools and tips to get inspiration from social media conversations, keyword and search trends as well as user problems.
This post by Al Biedrzycki, provides a completely new take on asking your readers for suggestions. Alec talks about how he solved his blog topic problem by creating an interesting campaign for his readers.
He basically told them that he would solve their marketing problems for free in the form of blog posts. I think this is an ingenious way to crowdsource your content ideas and keep your readers engaged.
If you’re a little tired of reading by now, here is an awesome compilation of videos by Kapost about expert content marketers talking about where they get their blog post ideas.
Don’t miss this one!
As always, I’ve saved the best for last. This GINORMOUS guide by Neil Patel is probably the most comprehensive guide on content marketing out there. It should be required reading for all beginners and is super useful for experienced marketers as well.
Neil puts forth detailed instructions on how to group your ideas together, find them and shortlist them. To find great topic ideas he goes in-depth into methods like analyzing keyword trends and research, using Google alerts and Google search itself and your own RSS feed.
Definitely a must read!
So there you have it. 8 amazing resources to help you fill up that editorial calendar fast. Now what are you waiting for? Get cracking and start creating some epic content!
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