Generating Great Content Ideas

Now that we’ve completed the planning phase of the content marketing framework, it’s time to start the creative phase. This phase just happens to be my favorite part. Here is where you’ll start to brainstorm ideas for creating blog articles, videos, ebooks, and other content important to your initiatives.

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The process for creating ideas for content usually includes the gathering of raw material, digesting the material, the unconscious processing, and those wonderful eureka moments. The brainstorming process can be done individually or with a group. Simply start throwing ideas on a piece of paper or whiteboard but be sure to make it relevant to what you’re offering and always think about your buyer personas’ reading habits. Remember, at first there is no such thing as a bad idea. You need to start somewhere.

Some thoughts for generating ideas include analyzing your competition to see what they’re talking about. Use search engines to see what relatable material could be out there. Google’s autocomplete feature is a wonderful tool for finding variations to different key words and phrases.

My personal process includes thinking about an ebook, then moving backwards using each chapter as a blog article and a video. If there were 12 chapters, then that would be 12 articles and 12 videos plus the ebook would total 25 pieces of content to promote. Ebooks are great because they take on the format of a minicollege text book, promoting the author as an expert in their field. Who wouldn’t want to do business with an expert?

You could even take those blog articles you created from the chapters and create additional articles by elaborating on a few topics from each chapter, in greater detail. Detailing two topics from chapter would create 24 more pieces of content.

In the next step of your journey we’ll look at the importance of setting up your website to handle the content marketing activities.

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