We talk about idea generation for new content on our blog – a lot. There’s a reason for that: coming up with new ideas for content is one of the most challenging yet essential aspects of content creation. Without fresh ideas, you don’t have any chance of appealing to your audience and serving them with the information and entertainment they crave. Most good content creators have dozens of different methods for drumming up ideas for new content, depending on the situation and how much they’re struggling to think of something fresh. So today, we’ll cover a few more ways you can conceive new ideas for your latest blog post or similar project.

Stalk Your Competitors

You’re very unlikely to be the only brand in your niche, so it sometimes helps to look to the competition for inspiration. They may be sharing with their audiences posts and content that cover angles and ideas you had never considered. These ideas can help provide you with some inspiration for topics and angles to cover as well, allowing you to resume pinging links to search engines, social media and beyond. You can take this idea one step further by using tools that determine which posts or pages are the most popular among your competitors, with the top performers being the most opportune angles for your own content.

Poll Your Readers

Whether on social media or on your blog, your community likely has some ideas of their own. You definitely should try tapping into them by asking what they’d like to see you cover next. While some ideas may not be feasible or necessarily worth the effort, this process serves multiple purposes. Most importantly, it can help generate new ideas. It also helps create more community-based engagements, which can strengthen brand loyalty. If you see repeated suggestions from your user base, then you know that that idea may be worth considering. Ultimately, this is a great way to determine what your audience cares about, what they’re thinking and what might appeal to them.

Comb Social Media

Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest can be full of great ideas just waiting to be written about – all you have to do is find them. Through a combination of your social circles and hashtags, you should be able to easily sift through commentary and opinions that are related to your niche. With this wealth of potential information and ideas at your fingertips, it won’t be long before you’re ready to start pinging links to new blog posts and content. Once you’ve found a couple of ideas that seem like good contenders, drill down further by using a combination of search engines and alerts to further expand on them and potentially generate even more ideas.

Content idea generation can feel like an isolated process, but there are literally dozens of different methods you can use to find fresh ideas. Whether you use social media, your audience or your competition for inspiration, it won’t be long before you’re back writing on a host of new topics. If you have any other methods you use to find fresh ideas, tell us below about which ones work best for you.