$0 Content Marketing Guide (Part 1): How To Find Proven Content Ideas

Those who succeed at doing content marketing tend to have a couple of things in common:

They have a large audience already; these guys do the heavy lifting in amplifying their content.

And secondly, the content is ‘built’ to go ‘viral’.

The challenge for most brands or individuals doing content marketing is that they have neither of those elements. And what makes it even harder is that you don’t have a sizeable budget to commit.

Over the course of this 3-part blog series, we’re going to provide you with a comprehensive blueprint for your content marketing – how to find proven topic ideas (part 1), how to ‘frame’ your content to maximize sharing (part 2), and how to promote your content (part 3) - and all without spending a cent on advertising or tools.

All you need is time, the desire to take action, and some hustle….

How to find content topic ideas that fly…...

You may have sat in one of these meetings before.

Someone fairly high up the food chain in your organization comes up with a brilliant idea that is “absolutely, positively, bound to go viral”. Everyone else nods and gets carried away by their admirable enthusiasm. No one asks for or sees any evidence as to how that will actually manifest.

This common problem, associated with many who publish content, is that they do so based on a whim or a hope that it will take flight. There are some techniques to find content ideas. Hope, however, is not one of these tactics.

[How to find content marketing idea #1] Top-ranked podcasts on iTunes

We are currently experiencing a wave of enthusiasm for the podcast.

The biggest authors and bloggers are now devoting serious attention to this aural medium. The intimate and engaging format allows great minds and organizations to really tell a story and draw in an audience while they walk the dog, workout at the gym or sit in traffic.

In the business and marketing space Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, Joe Pulizzi, Hiten Shah and many others have their own weekly or fortnightly podcasts.

Here's how you can plunder the world of podcasting for content ideas.

1. Install iTunes or Stitcher on your desktop, if you haven't done so already

On either of those players (we’re using iTunes), search with a broad keyword that’s relevant to your business. For example "startup".

2. Now, take a look at each podcast episode or channel

Each one of them is a potential topic idea.

3. Next, click to expand the series description

And make note of those to find WHAT to discuss.

Or look at the top charts for a relevant category to your business (e.g. Management and Marketing) and see what is the most popular, fast-moving, or most shared to help get a feel for the topics or themes that are earning most attention.

[How to find content marketing idea #2] Amazon search suggestions

Amazon is Disneyland for content topic ideas. Think about it. The online retail giant is many things nowadays, but primarily, it is a book retailer. And books are basically very large blog posts with catchy headlines. Here’s how to find topic ideas on Amazon:

1. Type in your broad keyword

So let's say you're in the business of vegan wholesales - an intentionally obtuse area of research by the way. Type "vegan diet" into Amazon’s search bar and over 28,000 items were returned. Significantly, most of these are book headlines and topics that you could modify for use straight away.

Let's take it a step further and…

2. Pick one of the books that came up in our search

We chose "Green & Lean: 20 vegetarians and vegan recipes for building muscle, losing fat, and staying healthy" (wow, that's a long title).

3. Make note of what's in the table of contents

And just like that, even more topic ideas on a silver platter.

4. Now, let's take a look at the customer reviews

We know that this book is quite popular because it was number four on the "vegan diet" charts, so let's see how we can use what's missing in the book and use those as topic ideas.

"Not a lot of recipes", 

"protein recommendation is way off", 

"not enough vegan recipes"

Looks like the author doesn’t differentiate vegan and vegetarian…..

When you see these complaint trends, take note because this is your audience telling you what they want to see more of and there’s a gap in the market you could exploit.

[How to find content idea #3]: Real Twitter conversations

Twitter is a great go-to source for breaking news, for live event conversation feeds, or just for networking with other professionals in an exchange of ideas.

The golden nugget for content creators, however, is in the real conversations happening between people.

But, how do you weed out real conversations from people promoting their blog posts or sharing links?

1. Type into the Twitter search bar ‘#hashtag -filter:links’

(Shout-out to Ann Smarty for introducing us to this trick)

Now you can see the discussions people are having in real time, that don’t involve some sort of promotion or branding. This will give you a great sense of what is popular and you may be able to create some more newsworthy content.

[How to find content marketing idea #4] Wikipedia table of contents

This is one our favorites for blog topic research.

Wikipedia is literally an encyclopedia of any topic imaginable curated by thousands of experts and organized into categories.

1. First, head over to Wikipedia and type in your broad keyword

For example, "pregnancy".

2. Then look at the table of contents for that topic

Some content ideas that sprung to mind after looking at the table of content:

• Average weight gain during pregnancy (from ‘Weight gain’)
• Effects of smoking during pregnancy (from ‘Recreational drugs’)
• Workouts for pregnant women (from ‘Exercise’)

[How to find content marketing idea #5] YouTube search

Did you know that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine with more than 3 billion searches processed a month, 100 hours’ worth of video are uploaded every minute and is bigger than Bing, Yahoo!, Ask and AOL combined?

Here's how you can leverage YouTube to find blog topic ideas.

1. Head over to Google, type in your broad keyword

For example, we typed in "DIY wedding".

2. Click the 'videos' tab

Straight away, you can note down those topics, but we're going to take it a step further.

3. Click on one of those videos

We chose "DIY Wedding: How to Plan a Wedding On A Budget! | VICKYLOGAN".

4. Scroll past the video and look at the description

Look at these topics and sub-topic ideas!

Take note of these topics, and put them in Google Keyword Planner to see which one is worth pursuing.

[How to find content marketing idea #6] Facebook groups

First, join Facebook groups that are relevant to your niche AND are active.

Once you've been approved, look for questions in that group.