How to generate plenty of audience-centric content ideas

Content is the lifeblood of any online business. However, regularly publishing new content is a challenging task. The biggest problem that many content marketers often face is finding relevant and audience-centric topics regularly.

If you are in the same boat, here are six tips for generating plenty of audience-centric content ideas for your blog.

 

1. Spy on your competitors

Perhaps the best and easiest way to come up with audience-centric content ideas is to spy on your competitors. If you have smart competitors that are effectively competing in your niche, you know that their content and SEO strategists must be doing something right.

In that case, you have a huge advantage, because you won’t have to invent the wheel. You can see what’s working and what’s not by spying on your competitors, analysing their content strategy, and identifying loopholes that you can use to your own advantage.

Check their popular posts section, analyse their social channels to see which posts are getting the most traction, and subscribe to their email newsletter to see what’s new.

You don’t have to copy everything they do. Make sure to add your own twist to it. The best way to approach is to identify topics that are resonating well with your shared target audience and then do what your competitor isn’t doing.

BuzzSumo and Ahrefs are two powerful tools that can help you with competitors and their content analysis.

 

2. Understand your target audience

You cannot create audience-centric content on a regular basis if you do not understand who your writing for. You need to be aware of who your readers are, what they want, the biggest problems they face, and the solutions to those problems.

And how do you understand all that?

You start by creating audience personas.

Include as much information as you can in the audience personas. Make them insanely detailed, and this becomes an asset for your business that will help you come up with better, more audience-centric content ideas in the future.

Apart from your personal information and experience, you can also use the following tools to come up with relevant information:

• Alexa
• SimilarWeb
• Google Analytics — the audience reports

 

3. Mine live chats

If you have a live chat option with a decent amount of traffic, make sure to mine those conversations regularly. 

People contact live chat representatives because they are facing problems. By mining those live chats every week or so, you will be able to identify plenty of problems that you can later solve via online content.

 

4. Utilise your Google Analytics account

Your Google Analytics account is a goldmine of data and valuable information. This information also includes dozens of audience-centric content ideas that you can write on.

Log into your Google Analytics account and browse to Behaviour Reports > Site Content > All Pages.

This report will list the most popular pages on your website. Expand the date range a bit (up to the last 6 to 12 months), and you will get a more true picture of what’s been the most popular blog posts on your website.

Use that information to identify what your audience is craving for. Then brainstorm different ideas that are still relevant to those pieces. Try to cover missing angles that you haven’t covered so far.

 

5. Talk to your sales and customer support teams

Sales and customer support are two teams that most frequently interact with your target audience, potential leads, and existing customers. They are out there in the trenches for most of the time and have the first-hand experience of what your potential customers are looking for.

Schedule a meeting on at least a bi-weekly basis and discuss possible content ideas. Ask them to list down the problems or topics they hear most often. You can then brainstorm and come up with many topics for blog posts based on that information.

 

6. Harvest Reddit and Quora

If you really want to know what your audience is talking about, you need to be where they are.

Reddit has subreddits for almost everything under the sun. Make sure to subscribe to relevant subreddits and thoroughly search them for any potential ideas. 

See what Redditors are talking about, read the comment section, and make a list of potential blog post topics.

Quora is another resource that you should spend a lot of time on. People post questions on Quora — which proves that they want to learn more about that topic.

Quora not only helps you identify relevant topics, but it can also help with credibility and traffic if you can provide answers there and then redirect them to your new blog post for more detailed information.