Content marketing is powerful. The need to always create new, exciting, and useful content for your audience is overwhelming. Luckily, there are plenty of ways keep on generating amazing content ideas that your audience will enjoy, no matter how you uncreative you feel. Below is an incredibly easy to follow approach you can refer to every time you get content blocked.

Disclaimer: I’m making an assumption in this piece that you understand your audience to a degree and also have some sort of content strategy in place. If not, you may not find the following tips helpful.

You’re out of ideas, now what?

The first thing you need to do is not panic. I know the weekly deadline you set in your content strategy is looming, but you can get through this. Below are three inspiration inducing strategies to turn your businesses content woes into idea generating heroes.

Answer Industry Questions

Quora might be the most underrated tool in the content marketers tool belt. Thousands of people login and tell you what they want to know, every single day. No matter what industry you are in, there will be a group of people who are discussing things that you know about!There are two tricks to Quora you can use for your content marketing. One is to actually respond to people on the platform. Now you’ve got an audience that you never had before who is already engaging. The second trick is to take the questions people are asking and turn them into responses. You can write blogs, create a YouTube video, podcast, whatever mediums you are using for your content strategy can benefit by simply answering questions about topics you and your business can answer.If you somehow run through all the questions on Quora you can turn to reddit. Reddit is a little bit tougher of a community to crack as a marketing professional. Creating a new account and then immediately spamming the subreddits with answers will likely end up getting you banned. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take a look at the topics being discussed and create content to answer those questions. Who knows, you might even have other people post your articles on reddit for you!

Revamp Old Content

If you’ve been at the content marketing strategy for awhile, you’ll likely have a treasure trove of content ideas at your fingertips from past posts.Say you wrote a blog a few years ago that did well and seems to still be relevant. Now’s your chance to turn that blog content into something new. Make it a snapchat story, or go live on instagram to share the carefully crafted ideas you already know people like.You can also update your blog with any new insights you may have gained. Instead of just letting letting that blog gather digital dust, you can make it more useful to your audience. This not only gives you better content on your site, you now have the opportunity to re-share this freshened up piece with your audience. You’ll get customers who are new to your brand enjoying it for the first time and existing customers who benefit from the updates.

Take An Opposing Stance on A Competitors Content

Your competitors are one of your most useful resources out there for content. Especially when they write something counter your businesses best practices and beliefs. Creating a piece of content that takes an opposing stance means you already have the basic outline of the piece done. You just need to rebut their points with the ones your company values. And they will have likely said things you haven’t even thought of yet, which is a great opportunity to take a stand on something new that aligns with your core values.You can take the approach of addressing your competitor in your content piece, but that’s not always a good way to do it. In fact, you don’t need to go full out declaration of war or even mention their name for your own content to make its mark. Just take the inspiration and run in your own direction.

Run a Backlink Report on Competitors and Replace Them

Another place for content ideas that comes from your competitors is where other places around the web link back to them. There are paid and free tools, like SEMRush or Ahrefs, where you can learn what websites have linked to content on your competitors websites.Then, you can take existing content you already have or write new content that better explains whatever was being linked to and share it with that website. If it goes well, you’ll have fresh new links back to your new content!

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