You’ve started producing and publishing content to boost the SEO visibility of your website and get in front of your ideal customers.

That’s great!

Getting started was probably straightforward. For most businesses, the main topics to write about are fairly obvious.

But that doesn’t last forever.

Chances are, at some point your inspiration for new content ideas seems to have evaporated.

After all, there’s only so many ways you can describe your business and convince your customers to choose you over a competitor.

What else is there to say?

Let me tell you – a whole lot! And coming up with more ideas doesn’t have to be complicated.

In fact, the possibilities are plentiful. Read on for some actionable tips to generate endless content ideas.

Read Your Own Existing Content

One of my favorite ways to generate content ideas is by reading my own existing content.

I go through my blog posts and look for things I’ve mentioned that could be their own blog post.
You can see an example of this in my SEO Agency vs SEO Freelancer post:

This sentence was slightly different before, but it sparked the idea of writing about the pareto principle in SEO.

An added bonus of this method is that you can then edit the previous post and add an internal link, strengthening your website’s SEO.

A win-win!

If you aim for each of your articles to contain at least one internal link to another article, that alone will go a long way in generating new content ideas.

Once you start doing this, you’ll even keep an eye on it while writing – your next content idea might just present itself on the spot!

Analyze Your Competitors

You can often get inspiration from the topics your competitors are writing about.

Maybe they’re taking an approach you hadn’t thought of before.

Maybe they’re covering industry trends you hadn’t covered yet.

You should never blatantly copy the content your competitors are publishing – but if certain topics drive success for them, this presents an opportunity for you to publish something better.

There may also be a content overlap with topics you are both covering.

It’s still worth analyzing those articles, as your competitor may be including additional angles or cover the topic more in-depth than you.

This is an excellent opportunity to learn and to update your own equivalent pages.

Further Reading: 5 Examples of Page Updates That Unlocked SEO Traffic Growth.

Use AI Tools to Help You Along

AI tools can help you generate endless content ideas – literally.

Let’s use ChatGPT as an example.

Here’s a prompt I like to use:

Here’s 5 blog posts that have already been published on my blog:

• Blog title 1
• Blog title 2
• Blog title 3
• Blog title 4
• Blog title 5

Give me 10 more blog post ideas that touch upon similar subjects and would be good additions to this blog.

That’s it.

Just based on the blog post titles I provide, ChatGPT usually gives me plenty of useful ideas I can pursue:

I like to keep things simple, but you could scale this up by providing more blog titles, asking it for more ideas, and refining the prompt.

Write Notes When Inspiration Strikes

If you’re passionate about running your business, chances are that you’re constantly thinking about how to improve it.

You can’t choose the timing of your thoughts and ideas – but you can jot them down as and when they emerge.

Ideas – including content ideas – often pop up when I’m doing something completely unrelated to work, like exercising, going for a walk, or taking a shower.

I write them down on the spot in my notes app, so I can revisit them later.

Sometimes I even include a quick and dirty content outline to help my future self remember my thought process.

This often leads to content I actually end up writing and publishing!

Pay Attention During Conversations

The best content ideas often come from conversations with people.

This can be a call or a conversation with a customer, partner, vendor, coworker, or any other stakeholder in your business.

It can even be a conversation with a friend or family member who asks about your work.

Any time you find yourself explaining things that seem obvious to you, but apparently aren’t to others – bingo, that’s a content idea!

I get content ideas all the time just from speaking to people.

Especially things your customers struggle with can be super valuable content ideas – this is your opportunity to address their pain points and highlight your product or service as the solution.

Don’t sleep on what’s right in front of you when speaking to people!

Use Google’s “People Also Ask”

In many industries, you can get content ideas directly from Google.

Let’s look at the example of a mobile payment provider.

A search for “mobile payment technology” reveals several topics related to mobile payments that you could cover.

You can also go more granular and do more specific searches – for example, search for topics you are already covering and see which questions Google associates with them.

These are excellent content ideas to cover on your website.

Bonus Tip: look at the “People Also Ask” section as part of your content writing process – you may be able to find additional angles for the current article you’re writing!

Cover Industry Trends

Why not publish content about the latest developments in your industry?

This could be as simple as an opinion piece on what impact you believe certain developments will have, or how your company is testing out the latest cutting-edge technology in order to improve the quality of your offering.

Not only does this position you as a thought leader in your industry – it’s also a natural way of generating more content ideas.

Maybe covering something new could even turn into a series of articles.

Create a Central Location for Content Drafts

To get the most out of all of the above methods, it’s best to create a system.

There’s several ways to go about this.

What I like to do is every time I have a new content idea, I immediately create a draft document for it in a dedicated Google Drive folder.

I also jot down a few sentences on what the article should be about.

This way, I always have several – sometimes dozens – content drafts in various stages of development, which I can pick and choose from when it’s time to sit down and do the actual writing.

You can do the same, and never run out of interesting topics to cover.

If you need help with content idea generation for your business, contact me so we can explore possibilities.