Where can I find content ideas?
“Where do you get all your content ideas?”
As someone who posts content regularly — on my own blog and on LinkedIn — this is something I’m often asked.
I’m an ideas person. In my last employed job it was my main responsibility and I’d have to come up with between 50 and 70 new ideas every month. So where did I get my inspiration? And where can you get yours?
Without further ado, here are 24 places you might find it — and what to look for.
1. Frequently Asked Questions
Okay, we’ll start with an obvious one.
Think about the questions your leads, prospects and customers are asking you. Because these are things your audience wants to know.
For examples, they could have questions about:
- Pricing and estimates
- The products/services you offer
- Product uses and recommendations
- Your process and how you work
- Lead times for project work
- Product guarantees/warranties
- What it’s like to work with you
- How to prepare to work with you.
These are all things you can answer in your content.
Depending on the question, the content might be an in-depth answer or an FAQ post, which covers a range of questions on the same topic.
2. Search engine searches
We’re used to performing specific searches for things we want to see — and Google has got pretty good at delivering what we want to see.
But what happens when you type in just one keyword?
In that case, Google doesn’t know what you want to see, so it gives you a selection of possible directions on that topic. And this can be an inspiration goldmine.
To get all the results, look at the results page list and the images.
For example, when I type in ‘copywriter’, I get:
- What is a copywriter?
- What a copywriter does
- Employee vs. freelancer
- How to work with a copywriter
- Cost of hiring a copywriter
- What makes a brilliant copywriter
- What to know when hiring a copywriter
- Copywriter vs content creator vs content marketer.
Good rules to follow
You need to be selective about the inspiration you take from this and make sure you’re choosing topics your target audience will be interested in reading.
Never plagiarise. Be inspired by what you find and create something on-brand that will speak to your audience.
3. Industry news
What’s happening in your industry and what are people talking about?
Are they subjects your target audience might find interesting — or could they be if you found the right angle?
How to find industry news
If you’re not subscribed to any publications for your sector, go to Google, enter an industry keyword, e.g. ‘farming’, then click the News tab to see the latest stories.
For example, there might be news about:
- New technology
- Emerging products
- Changes in your industry
- New trends vs dated styles
- Environmental issues.
Ask yourself how these things might affect your target market, or their relationship with you — and you might find some content inspiration.
4. Answer the public
Answer the Public is a website that helps you find the questions people are asking online about any given subject.
Go to the website and enter your subject in the box. The site will then give you a list of questions people are asking the search engines.
To give you an example, I asked what people are asking Google about office chairs.
Some of the questions it generated included:
- Will office chairs damage carpet/hardwood floors?
- Why are office chairs made of mesh?
- Which office chairs are best for your back?
- Where to buy office chairs near me?
- Can office chairs be regassed?
- Can office chairs be repaired?
If you sell office chairs, these are all questions you could answer on your blog.
Depending on the question, the content might be an in-depth answer or an FAQ post, which covers a range of questions on the topic.
5. Your own products/services
What might your target audience want to know about the products or services you offer?
Putting this information in a blog will give you the chance to go into more detail than you have on your main web pages. And it will satisfy the curiosities of those would-be customers who always need more information.
For example, if you’re selling a product, you can give more details on:
- How it works
- Its components
- What it can/can’t do
- Who it is/isn’t suitable for
- How it can be adapted/adjusted
- How it compares with similar products
- How it works in certain circumstances.
For ideas of exactly what to cover, head over to Amazon, look up the product you’re selling, or similar products, and check out the Q&A sections.
If you’re offering a service, you can give more detail about:
- What results they can expect
- What they need to get the best results
- Results other customers have had
- How the process works and what’s involved
- What input will be required from them
- What deliverables they’ll receive.
6. Mainstream news
Mainstream news is a great place to find the stories of the day and what people are talking about right now.
The stories you choose for inspiration should be understandable and relatable. But avoid anything that’s too controversial or potentially divisive.
How to get content ideas from mainstream news
For example, you could look for:
- Mainstream news stories about your industry/product/service
For example, there’s news story on plumbing titled, SNIPEF warns of increasing challenges for plumbing and heating profession, which could form the basis of an opinion piece. - Connections between a news story and your brand
For example, if you sell organic dog food, you might be inspired by a news story on How ultra-processed dog food could be making your pet sick. - Parallels between a news story and a point you want to make
For example, as I’m writing this, there’s a news story titled Suffolk bakery stuns customers with eye-watering cost of mince pies. This might inspire you to write an article on why your product/service might be considered expensive and what makes it good value.
You can also get inspiration from the comments sections on news stories — see number 8.
7. Popular culture
There’s a wealth of inspiration in popular culture, which includes:
- Music
- Movies
- TV programmes
- Fashion and style
- Technology
- Food and drink
- Books and literature
- Sports and games
- Memes and internet trends.
How to turn popular culture into content
For example, you could:
- Change the lyrics of a popular song to talk about your brand or prospect’s problem
- Write a post on which movie characters would be your ideal/non-ideal clients and why
- Write about how a TV character, who’s in trouble, could have been saved by your product/service
- Compare your brand to a sport, game or popular activity
- Create your own brand version of a current meme or internet trend.
8. Comments sections
To find inspiration from comments sections, look for relevant content on:
- News sites
- Podcast episodes
- Other websites’ blogs
- Video sharing sites, like YouTube and TikTok
- Social media platforms, like LinkedIn and Facebook.
Then scroll down to the comments and see what people are saying.
You’ll find all kinds of golden nuggets in here, including:
- Good questions that need good answers
- Bad advice you can counter with better advice
- Popular beliefs — which may be wrong and need debunking
- Common issues people are having and need answers to.
REMEMBER, this exercise isn’t about leaving a valuable reply in the comments section. It’s about taking your valuable reply and using it to create your own content for your blog or other channel.
9. Research studies
Research studies can provide a wealth of insight into your industry, customers and emerging markets.
For example you might find:
- Statistics you can build your content around
- New trends and changes to current trajectories
- Outlooks and expectations for the future
- Changes to opinions and behaviours
- Adaptation to change and new technology.
The studies must be relevant to your industry — and they have to be fresh and current, so the information is new to people. Make sure you’re following the leaders who conduct/publish the research, so you can be among the first to act on it and bring it to your audience’s attention.
And the information or angle you choose needs to be something your target market will want to read. For example, if there’s been a change in buyer behaviour, you could talk about how your brand is adapting to that and making a difference for your customers.
10. Courses and workshops
Courses and workshops help us learn new skills and keep our existing skills up to date.
As a result of what you’ve learned, you might:
- Make a change in your business and talk about it
- Share something that surprised or shocked you
- Update your process and explain why it was necessary to do it
- Share a new tool, technique or piece of information
- Introduce a new service, or service element, and talk about it
- Adapt an existing service and explain the changes you’ve made.
Just make sure what you’re sharing will be of interest to your target audience.
11. Online forums
Online forums are places where people spill. You’ll find questions being asked, struggles being shared and issues being debated — which all offer opportunities for creating content.
There are different forums for different industries, but Reddit and Quora are two more general ones and host discussions on a wide range of topics. You want to find the discussions your ideal customers are having and scour them for content ideas.
How to use online forums to create content
Here are some examples of how you could use forum threads in your content:
- Look at the questions your audience is asking and create content that answers them
- Understand your audience’s struggles and create helpful content for them
- Read the issues being talked about and create an opinion piece using your own perspective
- Discuss why the things they’ve tried haven’t worked and give alternative suggestions
- Create content that debunks any bad advice you’ve seen and give better suggestions
General tips
- Feel the emotions coming from the discussion and lean into them with your content
- Show empathy where there are struggles you can help your audience solve
- Note the language your audience is using and use it to inform your SEO keyword research
- Remember, this exercise isn’t about leaving a valuable reply — it’s about taking that reply and using it to create content for your blog or other channel.
12. Books and ebooks
Books and ebooks can contain a wealth of information and advice.
How to use books and ebooks to create content
Here are some examples of how you could use that information and advice in your content:
- Share information that will be useful or interesting to your audience
- Review a book you’ve read and recommend it, where appropriate
- Discuss a theme from a book and apply it to a scenario or experience
- Talk about advice you’ve followed and how it’s changed your approach
- Take a quote from the book and write about what it means to you.
13. Your special skills/traits
Specialist skills, traits and equipment can be things that make you different from your competitors. You can capitalise on these in your content.
For example:
- Write a post giving your audience a number of good reasons to work with you
- Describe how your specialist skills solved a tricky problem for a customer
- Talk about how one of your traits makes you particularly good at what you do
- Explain how specialist equipment you have makes the difference for your customers.
14. Customer experiences
Social proof is one of the most powerful things you can share in your content. The experiences of customers who’ve worked with you, bought from you, or are using your products can help persuade others to do the same.
For example:
- Share your latest testimonial on your social media channels
- Write a case study and include your customer’s input
- Curate a series of testimonials that all say similar things
- Document a project, from start to finish, with your customer’s consent
- Use customer-created content, like video testimonials and product demonstrations.
15. Free image sites
Images can be stimulating, bringing up memories, anecdotes and other ideas that would work to create a piece of storytelling content.
I’ve suggested using the free sites because you can download the images and include them with your content. Just be nice and remember to credit the creator!
The paid image sites can also be great for inspiration, but you have to pay for those images if you want to use them in your content.
Free and paid stock image sites
Here are a few of my favourites for getting content inspiration:
Everyone loves a good story
Your story might be:
- Your brand’s origin story
- A customer success or transformation story
- An interesting anecdote
- A glimpse behind the scenes of your business
- A lesson you learned
- How your product/service came into being.
16. Conversations
Our daily conversations and email exchanges can spark some interesting content ideas.
For example you might have conversations with:
- Clients
- Prospects
- People who call you
- Other business owners
- Family members.
And these conversations might bring up:
- Questions
- Current issues
- Problems and difficulties
- Real experiences/stories
- Creative ideas/suggestions.
How to use conversations
Always start with the main points you want to make and create your content around them.
- Answer the question you were asked
- Talk about the other person’s opinion — did you agree with it? If not, why not?
- Describe the problem or difficulty and give your advice on it
- Retell the story and talk about what you learned or what surprised you
- Talk about an idea you had that stemmed from a conversation.
If you’re talking about real experiences or stories, and you don’t have the other person’s permission to share them, you need to be smart. Focus on the point of the post and never divulge names, companies or anything that could identify them.
17. Google images
If you’ve never thought of looking at Google images for content ideas before, you’ve been missing out.
Things you can find on Google images include:
- Photographs and illustrations
- Themes and topic suggestions
- Charts and graphics
- Infographics
- Famous quotes.
And these can inspire so much content.
Let’s say you’re creating content for your garden centre and you want to focus on products for home gardeners. With a simple search for ‘vegetable gardening tips’, I found all these ideas:
- Building and maintaining raised beds
- Creating vertical vegetable gardens
- The easiest vegetables to grow
- Involving your children in vegetable gardening
- Vegetables you can grow in pots
- Growing vegetables in a small space
- Where to position your vegetable garden
- What seeds you need to plant and when
- Tools you’ll need for your vegetable garden
- Garden pests and how to deal with them
- How to grow organic vegetables at home.
And these are all topics you can link back to the products you sell.
18. Social media
Your social media feeds and comments sections can be a source of great content ideas.
How to get content ideas from social media
Find the latest trends
Find emerging trends and popular topics by following industry leaders and relevant hashtags. Create content that adds your own ideas, opinions and predictions to the mix. You can look for more visual/style trends on platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.
Run a poll or ask a question
Google loves original content and you can create it by running your own polls, surveys and ‘ask me anything’ posts in your social networks. Find a topic that will interest your audience, ask your network then create a post from the results you get.
Look at your competitors
What are your competitors posting about? Are there topics they’re missing that could be opportunities for you? Are they getting questions or complaints and are these things you could address in your content?
Join relevant communities
Social communities can be amazing places to find the latest ideas, issues and opinions in your industry. And these can provide topics for great content.
Head to the comments sections
In the comments sections of relevant posts, people will be asking questions, sharing problems and airing misconceptions. You can create content that addresses these.
19. Latest trends
What are the latest trends in your industry? You can find out from social media and industry publications.
Trends might include:
- Changing trends in buyer behaviour
- Evolution of tech or customer experience
- Changing tastes or preferences
- Willingness to adopt new technology
- Use of online platforms and channels
- Consumer awareness and expectations
- Changing styles, fashions or schemes.
If you want to use an emerging trend as the basis for your content, think about your audience and what they’ll find most interesting. For example, it could be the trend itself or the way your brand is responding to the trend.
For example, maybe you’re responding to a trend by:
- Introducing new product lines
- Reviewing your customer experience
- Giving customers new or different options
- Listening to customer demand.
Create content that shows them what you’re doing and how you’re improving as a result.
20. Experiential learning
Experiential learning is learning from experiences you’ve had — and it’s a great opportunity to tell a story.
For example, it could be:
- Your biggest success in business and how you achieved it
- Your biggest failure in business and what it taught you
- A result you achieved for your client, despite all the odds
- A time when you pushed yourself out of your comfort zone
- A change you made in your business and why it was needed
- What you learned about business from [something unrelated]
- A time when you set yourself a challenge and what happened.
Stories of real-life learning are always engaging and are a good way to show your credibility, humanity and determination.
21. Competitor analysis
What are your competitors doing? Or, more to the point, what are they not doing? Spying on their content could help you fill a content gap or create something better.
Finding content gaps
Look at your competitors’ content to find topics they haven’t covered, content they haven’t updated in the last couple of years and current topics they’re not talking about. These could be opportunities for you.
For example, you might:
- Find topics they haven’t covered and write about them yourself
- Blog about a new idea or emerging trend they haven’t covered
- Look for areas where you could write deeper and more niche content
- Seek out older content for topics you could revitalise with new ideas and research
- Explore a topic from a different angle or bring a fresh perspective.
Competing for rankings
There’s that one competitor whose articles always show up on Google for the keywords you want to rank for.
So what’s their secret?
Maybe they wrote an exceptional article that deserves its place on page one — in which case, kudos to them.
But what if their article isn’t so great? What if it’s short and doesn’t cover the topic in enough detail? What if it’s old and the information is outdated? What if they’re only ranking highly because they have no better competition?
If that’s the case, you could be their competition.
You can compete with a ranking competitor by writing a longer and more in-depth article that has a current date and covers everything they missed.
Remember
This isn’t about copying your competitors — that would be plagiarism. It’s about looking for their missed opportunities and using them to create unique content of your own.
22. Online reviews
Product reviews
Look at the best and worst reviews for your own products and your competitors’ similar products. And look for recurring themes in the comments, where people are saying the same things.
You’ll find customers revealing:
- Why they chose the product and whether it lived up to expectations
- What they like or don’t like about the product
- Features they love that you could be promoting better
- What they wish they’d known before they bought it
- How they’ve used the product and how it worked in different scenarios
- Issues they’ve had with the product or reasons for returning it
- Questions prospects are asking other customers about the product
- Comparisons with other similar products they’ve used.
And this could give you inspiration for:
- Mythbusting content
- How-to instructions
- Frequently asked questions
- Troubleshooting information
- Buyer guides that compare products
- Benefit-focused content.
Service reviews
Look at your competitors’ reviews on their websites, on their Google Business Profile and on independent review sites, like Trustpilot and Yelp. Look at the good reviews and the bad ones and notice recurring comments/themes.
For example, customers will often talk about:
- What they liked or didn’t like about the service
- The quality of the work they received
- How easy or difficult the onboarding process was
- How reliable and communicative the provider was
- If the service was good value for money
- Whether the advice they got was good
- The results they’ve had since the work was done.
And this could give you inspiration for content on:
- Skills you excel in, but don’t shout about as much as you should
- What you do to make things easy or hassle-free for customers
- The value and quality that goes into every project you work on
- Advice you always give to customers — and why you give it
- What your customers or clients have said about you.
23. Seasons and calendar events
Some businesses change with the seasons.
If you’re a product-based business, you might have different products to promote at different times of the year — and your content can reflect this.
For example, you might look at seasonal:
- Clothing and accessories
- Garden care
- Entertainment
- Beauty trends
- Skin and haircare
- Food and drinks
- Local seasonal produce
- Estate or facilities management
- Home furnishings
- Travel and tourism
- Health and fitness
- Sports and leisure activities
- Vehicle or home maintenance.
If you’re a service business, you might be required for different projects depending on the time of year. Or some projects might need to be completed at a certain time of year.
You can also look at calendar events, like Valentine’s Day, Halloween, religious holidays, regional celebrations, special days and charity events you support.
24. Taking time out
Some of the best content inspiration comes from your subconscious brain, while you’re doing other things.
So take your foot off the gas, step away from your desk and give your mind some space to wander.
For example, you could try:
- Crafting or creating art
- Exercising or sports
- Gardening or decorating
- Playing a game or doing a puzzle
- Visiting a museum or art gallery
- Taking a walk out in nature
- Reading a book or magazine
- Cooking or baking
- Listening to music
- Housework, errands or chores
- Going to a local café and watching the world go by.
You might also like…
About the author
I’m Jenny Lucas, a blog content specialist, ideas person and all-round Wordy Bird, from Leicester, UK.
I’ve been working as a content strategist and blog writer for more than 15 years.
Check out my content services >>
Read more articles from my own blog >>
