Online promotion is a focus for many companies. They may start with SEO, but the best way to draw in new customers and get eyes on your site is by producing content. You can create a wide range of content types, including blogs, eBooks, charts, videos, and much more. These types of content get people talking about your business and bring in even more people to our site. However, creating new content takes some work, especially if it is going to be of reasonable quality. Creating new content on a consistent basis takes some dedication and time, and not everyone can manage to do so effectively. You may run out of ideas or just feel like you have nothing relevant to say to your audience anymore. It may seem that you have covered every aspect of your industry. Don’t let that feeling stop you though, as there are ways you can find new and fresh content and ensure that you have plenty to say for a long time to come.
Focus on the Best Stuff
One way to start finding new ideas for new content is to go back and look at the best content you have produced so far. Look through your archives to see what attracted the most views and think about ways you can reuse or repurpose that content to create another hit. You just may find a way to give your customers more value. Keep the following in mind when you are searching for your old content:
- Perennial Content- Focus on content that is evergreen and is applicable to any time of the year. If your best stuff was made with a holiday theme or is focused on a specific news story, then you want to disregard it for the purpose of this exercise. Instead, focus on content that has a continuous value that people always seem to be coming back to.
- Quality Content- You also want to look at content that is of a decent quality. It can only hurt your company if you keep recycling content that isn’t very good or that is clickbait-y. Just because it had a lot of clicks does not mean the content was good.
Use these factors when you search your records to find the best and most relevant content you can use once more. You don’t want to necessarily reuse the same content, but you may be able to repurpose it for a new audience or to say something a bit different.
Make a List
Once you have looked through your biggest content hits, make up a list of topics you are considering writing about. Maybe you can expand on something you wrote about before. Perhaps you can use one of your older posts as a starting point for something entirely different that shares similar themes. Put the best ideas at the top of the list and use them as a basis for even more ideas. You want to make your content easy to read, so keep these pieces of information in mind as you write:
- Connect with and interest your readers- you want to engage your audience, so give them something interesting to start with. Also give them away to interact with you, perhaps through comments. Invite conversation to make your content more appealing and user friendly.
- Avoid wordiness- If your content is too long, most people won’t read it all the way through it. Try to keep your content concise and think about making it into multiple parts if you have a lot you want to say.
- Back up your words- You don’t want to just say things without a basis for them. You can back up what you are saying by presenting supporting evidence.
Creating a list like this can make it easier to create great content quickly. You also get a good sense of what is working and what isn’t.
Using the Same Content Again
You may start to feel like you are covering the same ground as you try to turn old content into something new. If that starts to become an issue, you can think about actually reusing the same content you wrote. You won’t always find new uses for what you wrote in the past or ways to expand on it, but you may find a way to repurpose what you wrote. Remember that new people are always finding your content, so you may be writing to an entirely different set of people than you did last time. Don’t let that cause you to just repeat the content you have used before, but use it as inspiration to say some of the same things in a new way or from a new angle. One way to do that is to change up the way a post looks. You can format it differently or add-in graphics. You can even make a video out of a blog post.
You may also want to refresh what you have written. Those old posts may hold interest to modern readers, but they could contain information that is no longer valid. You can always refresh them and note on the article what was changed and updated. This can be a great way to bring more eyes to a post that has already been successful. You may want to think about posting old content on a new site. You can write a guest blog or use a site that allows anyone to post content. This allows you to reach a new audience without creating new content. This puts your company in front of a new group of people and presents new opportunities.
Hold to Your Plan
Don’t just make a list as we mentioned earlier and then not do anything with it. This advice is to help you start making more content. So use what we have given you and put it to work to help you get some fresh ideas or to do something fresh with what you have. These can be great ways to reduce the stress that comes with trying to create new content.
