4 Easy Ways to Generate Content Ideas

Sometimes it's hard to generate new content ideas for social media or your blog, especially when faced with a daunting blank white post space (I definitely know the feeling!). However, before writer's block really sets in, there are a wide variety of resources to help you come up with content ideas.

1. What's Trending? First, it is useful to consider what is currently trending on social media platforms. A great first stop for this is Twitter Trends, and Trendsmap even put these trending topics and hashtags over a US map if you are looking to reach a specific area. However, this may be too general for your needs. You can use Hashtagify.me to help you find relevant hashtags for your specific topic. Here is the example Hastagify.me for the hashtag #SocialMedia. Google Trends is also another good topline assessment for what's popular online. Alltop shows the top articles on a wide variety of news and other general interest sites.

2. Utilize Your Reading Habit. If you're like me, you probably read a lot of articles (online and offline) during the week, whether they are related to work or not. I am also subscribed to a variety of newsletters that often give me blog fodder. However, sometimes it is just as easy to forget what you've read when you sit down to write an article. When I find an article I want to save for later (potentially for blogging purposes) I save it in Pocket. Pocket is a great, free website/browser extension that lets you easily save web pages for later, and you can organize them by tags. I give all ideas for a potential posts a certain tag to keep things clear. 

3. Check Out Online Keyword Analyzers. I have had some posts about choosing the right keywords for certain topics in the past, and some of the same tools that will help you choose the best keywords will also help you come up with good ideas. BuzzSumo and Quick Sprout have more comprehensive lists, but here are two of my favorites:

• BuzzSumo. You can search BuzzSumo for a keyword and it will give you thew most shared articles containing that keyword, as well as general trending news.
• Moz Keyword Explorer. This is the site that just keep giving! I am a huge fan of Moz, and this handy website allows you to explore the popularity of a keyword, related keyworkds, and related articles. One of the most useful features is the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) Analysis, which will show you typical search results for keywords.

4. Brainstorm with Friends and Colleagues. If you are really stumped, it is always productive to ask friends and colleagues what they have been reading lately. You may also ask them if they have heard anything interesting related to your industry. You never know what they have been reading, or watching, and you may get clued into new influencers or sites that will serve as great future inspiration. Plus - sometimes it's good to get offline, too!

Hopefully these will give you some ideas for generating new content ideas. Do you have any additional techniques for generating content?

5 Easy Ways To Repurpose Your Content

If you are a content producer, you already know that it takes a lot of hard work to develop blog posts, white papers and reports. So after you've done all that work and posted it, what comes next? Repurpose it into other social media posts of course! Why bother to repurpose? The shortest answer is: audience. Posting content in new venues will reach a bigger audience than through blogging alone. Plus, since you already created the content, it is just a question of tweaking it a bit.

Here are 5 easy ways to repurpose your content: 

1. Make a Visual. Visuals are so important on social media. Facebook posts with images get over twice as much engagement than those without images. Even if your post does not include any images, you can create graphics by pulling out a particularly memorable, quote, fact, or even just your post title, and create a graphic with text overlaid. You can check out my previous post on the best stock photo resources for some great backgrounds. Canva is another great (and free) resource for making simple, clean web graphics (seen below).

2. Create an infographic. Infographics are a great user-friendly way to share your info (if your data lends itself to an infographic, of course). Don't be intimidated by the design factor, though, there are many great tools to throw together a professional-looking. Canva also has the capability to create infographics, as does Venngage (an example of which is seen below) and Piktochart.

3. Make a Tip Sheet. If you have a few related posts, or ways to expand a little on what you have already written, you can turn your post into a downloadable PDF tip sheet or guide for download. This is an especially good way to make a "lead magnet"  to entice people to sign up for your email (example below from Omnimonster). If you are new to the idea of lead magnets, Amy Porterfield has a great short video introduction.

4. Break it up. With a little tweaking, a long blog post can be broken up into a condensed Facebook post (or two) or a series of tweets. If your post has have bullet points (like this one!), you can tweet them out over the course of a few days - with a link to your blog post - to build interest, and drive traffic to your blog.

5. Add some audio (or video). This is the most ambitious repurposing - turning content on your blog into podcasts, or even Facebook Live videos. In these channels, you can go over what you covered in the blog (you could even consider doing a live Q&A after you discuss the post content). If you have a lot of related content you may even consider doing a webinar. Creating audiovisual content may require the most work, but it can also have the largest payoff. Facebook prioritizes videos in news feeds, and it has been shown that content with videos gets higher engagement.

While each of these steps requires a little extra work, you will reap the rewards of an expanded audience. Do you have favorite way to repurpose content?

What is the correlation between reading and sharing links?

If you see a link being shared 100 times on Twitter - is it receiving 100+ clicks? Not necessarily. According to a recent study from Columbia University and the French National Institute, 60% of links shared on social media are never clicked on. What does this mean for the content producer? First, headlines should be as compelling as possible to encourage click-through. Be careful, though! Creating a provocative title can be a double-edged sword. Though the "10 things you'll never believe!" school of headlines may attract readers once, unless you have absorbing content to back up the headline, they may not return. 

Second, due to the relative scarcity of clicks, content can (and should) be shared more than once, at different times of day, in order to attract the largest audience. The researchers found that some links were clicked on even days after they were published. Finally, if you can get others to share your content, you are likely to get more traction. Links shared by friends or close connections garnered more clicks than average than shares directly from primary sources. These findings lead to a larger question: is sharing still a reliable metric to measure engagement? This study seems to suggest that while number of shares may be a useful measure of reach, this stat needs to be coupled with a click-through rate to measure engagement more effectively. The full paper can be read here.