I think everybody who’s ever launched a website, blog or social media site has every intention of keeping it up-to-date and fresh but all too often this doesn’t happen.
Here are some ways to expand on ideas you have in regards to your online content.
Brainstorm
I’m using Evernote to add ideas for this website. I can access it via their website, and also via the phone app. Of course you could use a paper notebook too.
Online tools for expanding on your ideas
Once you have a list of ideas you can use some online tools to help develop these ideas, and see what’s also of interest to others who could be searching for your topic area.
Google trends
Google trends will show you what’s trending on search around the world.
You can select the country you’re in to see what’s a ‘hot search’ on any given day.
You can then narrow it down by putting in some search terms
I’m on the lookout for a dog at the moment and I’m interested in a rescue dog so I thought I’d see the interest in that.
I used ‘rescue dogs’ and then added ‘pet rescue’ to compare with it. See the spike above of the search term ‘pet rescue’. You can drill down to see why a term has the results it does and turned out that there’s a game called ‘Pet Rescue Saga’ which is most likely the reason why that search term has risen recently.
See the letters over the line graph in the results? Hover over those to see the news around that search term at that particular time.
You’re also able to search regionally. For example ‘pet rescue’ is used more in certain countries than others.
Question and answer websites
Yahoo answers
Type a question into Yahoo answers. You’ll get loads of inspiration and you’ll see what questions others are asking that might fit in with what you can also write about.
Google search
Good old Google search is one you can start typing a question or search term into and it will suggest things for you as well.
Quora
Quora is another one to check out, although you have to sign-in to use it. You can create questions yourself and add answers to questions. You can also follow people so it’s more of a search/social media site which you need to invest a bit of time into to make the most out of it.
Now that you’ve got a bunch of great ideas for your site, now you’ve got to implement them. That’s the harder part.
Where do you get your content creation inspiration from?
