Brainstorming Content Ideas For Any Niche
Let’s talk about content today. By now you hopefully have picked a niche, and you may already have a website up and running and you are ready to get some great content on there.
In case you’re not sold yet on the whole content and in particular “free content” idea, let me share with you what I like about it and why I spend a good bit of my time each week writing for my sites (including this one of course).
1) People need to find you. Writing lots of good content does this in two different ways. It will send you search engine traffic and people will talk about, link to and recommend others visit your site.
2) People need to trust you. It takes an average of 7 points of contact before someone buys from you. You also need to show that you know what you are talking about and are a nice person (people buy from people they like). Great content can do that for you.
3) It’s a lot of fun – I enjoy helping people and sharing what I’ve learned over the years. If what I’m sharing on this site for example helps just one other person make enough with affiliate marketing to quit her day job, it’s well worth the effort for me. What you do for a living shouldn’t just be for the money, it should also be gratifying and helping others is the perfect way to accomplish that.
With all that said and no matter how many content ideas you have in the beginning, you will get to the point where you just can’t come up with another blog post or article idea. Here’s what I do when that happens to me.
Keyword Research
When I need some fresh ideas for content for my websites, my first stop is usually keyword research.
Personally, I like the paid wordtracker tool for my keyword research (mainly because it automatically shows me how hard it will be to compete for a particular keyword and because it gives me up to 1000 keyword ideas for each term I enter). Good free alternatives are the free wordtracker tool and the Google Adwords keyword tool.
I generate a list of a couple of hundred keywords and then sort through them, looking for keywords that would make good topics. You’ll often find questions and “how to” or “example” keyphrases in your list. Keep an eye out for those since they are often easy to turn into an article or blog post. Other than that, just pick the ones that you can quickly and easily write content on.
Starting with the keywords has the added benefit of sending you more search engine traffic in the long run, since you know that these are terms that people are already actively searching in the search engines. They might as well find the answer on your website.
Extra Tip – Look at what searches bring readers to your site already. To do this log into your stats program (I recommend Google Analytics) and see what keywords bring people to your site. Often you will find topics or even questions that you haven’t already addressed. Create some fresh content based on those keywords.
Ask Your Readers For Questions
Once you have some regular readers, or you may even be building a list, ask your readers and subscribers what they would like to learn more about. If you participate in social networks (i.e. facebook, twitter etc.) you may want to ask there as well. Keep a running list of questions as they come up and then answer them one at a time in your blog posts or articles.
Use Yahoo Answers and Forums
If you don’t have any questions yet, or you want to look for additional ones, visit yahoo answers or forums that cater to your target market. In both places you will find plenty of questions on all kinds of subtopics related to your niche.
I like to keep a swipe file of good questions. It’s simply one long word document that I copy and paste the questions into it. As I answer them, I delete them from the document.
Browse Article Directories
When none of the above are triggering good ideas, I browse through some of my favorite article directories to see what others have written. I don’t read the actual articles, but look at the titles instead. The reason I’m not reading the articles is that I don’t want to subconciously copy anything in the original article. I also don’t use the same title. Instead I use the titles to trigger ideas of my own.
Once the ideas start flowing, don’t forget to write them down. You may only need one good idea for a blog post today, but if you are coming up with 5 or 10 good ideas, you may as well jot them down and save them for down the road.
Just give these brainstorming ideas a try and I’m sure you’ll always be ready to create more great content for your niche websites.
P.S. I’m always looking for more niche marketing topics. What are your questions about finding a niche, getting started in it or anything else niche marketing related. Leave me a comment with your questions and I’ll do my best to anwer them.
You may also like to read:
- Niche Business Ideas – Introducing Affilite Niche Packs
- 10 Ways To Come Up With Fresh Content Ideas
- Best Niche Markets – 3 Ways To Come Up With Ideas
- How To Find Affiliate Products For Your Niche
- How To Come Up With Article Ideas That Are Perfect For Deep Linking
Tags: niche, niche content, niche content ideas, niche market, niche marketing
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Some good information there Sue. I like the tip about asking your list subscribers for what they want. I’ve always been a bit lazy with my autoresponder and I know it should work harder for me.
Rob :)