Marketing / Content Marketing

10 ways to never run out of topic ideas again

Irina Weber

Updated: Dec 07, 2023 · 7 min read

Toolkit for download in this article

content marketing ideas

To keep your online presence fresh and engaging, it's imperative to develop an easy way to create consistent content on social media. Sooner or later, many small buinesses reach that point where they run out of topic ideas. However, here are some neat tricks you can utilize to keep rolling out high-quality content:

1. Use Quora

Social media engagement gets easy when you know what people want. Quora can be a great starting point for learning what people want and giving it to them.

At Quora, you can find a ton of interesting questions on a variety of subjects, build a list of relevant keywords, and use them as fuel for your content creation. You can also look for questions with the most views or the ones with impressive followings. Just enter a broad keyword in the search bar and get highly specific questions and answers.

2. Use chatbots

Chatbots are an effective tool for generating content ideas and providing personalized content to customers who directly ask questions. The chatbots extract insights from people on product performance, suggestions, preferences, tips, etc.

Getting insight into the key terms can be a great source for creating highly-personalized and relevant content. Once you integrate chatbots into your content marketing strategy, you can easily interact with your target audience and gather valuable data.

3. Search for relevant subreddits

Reddit is known as a news and content aggregator that contains different subreddits related to all sorts of topics. Many subreddits include valuable information and tips that you won’t find anywhere else on the internet. People don’t shy away from asking for advice and often sharing their personal experiences and achievements in any niche.

Just choose a topic that interests you and devote some time to any small business subreddit. I'm 99% confident that any topic with hundreds of upvotes and comments can be your next topic idea.

Alternatively, you can use the Keyworddit free tool to scrape subreddits and extract related keywords along with their monthly search volume. The tool allows you to delve into the psyche of an entire community and choose the best keywords from their hiveminds.

4. Monitor social chatter

Social media monitoring, also known as social listening, gives you the ability to gain insight into how to be helpful and provide value.

"Social media monitoring is like people watching in a crowd to find creative inspiration," said Brian White, founder of Brian White & Associates. "You can learn more about people, what they want, what makes them act, and use that data to come up with successful content ideas."

For social media monitoring, I'm using Mention to dive deeper into topics with specific treatments and real-life examples. Once you set up alerts in this tool, you can easily monitor any topics to reveal recurring themes, questions, and trends, watch the conversation between your target customers, and search for specific questions published by your audience. If you notice that a certain topic is widely covered by many media outlets, it's best to focus on a different content idea.

5. Use keyword search tools

Conducting keyword research can be really fun. And what's more, keyword research is an amazing way of revealing new content ideas to find and expand your content ideation process.

For that purpose, I love experimenting with different tools like SE Ranking or Answer The Public. Both tools provide long-tail keywords connected to various questions, comparisons, and related search queries that can also come out in search results. The first tool is quite robust and can help you with competitor and backlink analysis.

6. Come up with Google Autocomplete

Google Autocomplete can be your initial stage for finding topic ideas, but it's often neglected because we search for something more sophisticated. According to the company’s own caveat, Google makes search predictions based on factors like popularity and similarity.

Once you start typing a keyword, you will get popular keyword suggestions that you can write about and start ranking for these search terms. You can also find other useful phrases in the “People also ask” and “Related searches” sections.

You will notice that some of these searches are geo-targeted. So, if you run a local business, you can use these ideas and add them to your content. As you can see, even a simple Google search can supply you with enough content ideas for weeks.

7. Research top-performing content of your competitors

Analyzing your competitors will help you to discover their top-performing content, make more informed decisions about the content you want to create, and start generating your own content ideas.

Here are some ways to generate topic ideas with your competitors:

  • Monitor your competitors’ email marketing newsletters. Check out their email updates, related business news, case results, seasonal campaigns, frequency, and how they address the target audience during their campaigns.
  • Analyze their videos that get more interactions, read comments, find out what works, and emulate their success.
  • Discover competitors’ keywords and ads for organic and paid search by using SE Ranking Competitor Research tool. You can reveal keywords with similar meaning to expand your research and find new content ideas.

8. Review relevant groups

Closed social media groups are like niche-related forums where people discuss topics, industries, products, interests, and much more. In most cases, these groups don’t allow sharing articles because they'll look like spam. Try to search for groups in your niche that include a lot of questions and answers.

You can find a lot of groups on Facebook, Slack, and LinkedIn that bring together individuals who share a common interest. People usually show their expertise, answer the questions, mention their services, or share valuable information. You can also gather these FAQs and create unique content for your target audience.

9. Discover trending topics

As trends come and go, they provide a great way for you to come up with a new content idea. You can explore how the trending topic lines up with your brand. Search for trending topics that are entirely relevant to your target audience.

The best way to find trending content is to use Google Trends for keyword research. Just enter a search term and see how the search volume changes over time. Using this data, you can better understand whether it’s worth creating content related to your topic.

You can also check how popular your search term is in your location during the specified time frame. To get more data, you can learn more about related queries since the last time period.

Another way to see more trending topics is Twitter Trends. You can easily personalize your trends based on your location, check out what’s trending, and come up with fresh content ideas.

10. Ask your customers or followers for ideas

The best way to know what your customers want is to ask them. You can connect with them via social accounts, relevant groups, or forums, and generate a list of engaging content ideas.

Another way to ask for ideas is to conduct polls or surveys. For example, you can use polls in Instagram stories or ask questions on Facebook. Alternatively, you can always use online survey tools like Survey Anyplace.

Bonus tip: Use web analytics tools

Everyone knows that successful content marketing starts with engaging content, but if you don’t measure content performance and make necessary changes, your content marketing efforts will never pay off. Using web analytics tools is a perfect solution to measure content quality and better understand what content topics readers enjoy the most.

For getting a clearer idea of your audience’s interests and needs, you can use Finteza to find out which type of content users find valuable and desirable. The tool can measure traffic quality and provides insights into conversion rates by channels, keywords, or separate ads within your content strategy, including links to lead magnets.

Final thought

If you want to keep your audience engaged, you need to create a game plan for generating topic ideas before you completely run out. Use the methods I've detailed above to come up with content ideas that will enhance your content marketing strategy.

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