SEO, Social Media, Blogging, Email Marketing… They all require a lot of ‘original’ content to be generated in order to be successful, but often businesses struggle in creating ideas for this. Even if you are an expert in your industry, writing something that people actually want to read can be tricky. But there is help out there from some handy online tools…
- Google Keyword Planner – last year Google made some updates to their Keyword tool, adding in some extra features to give you additional ideas on what to target. Enter your starting point e.g. ‘hairdressing’ and it will return pages of related keywords/ phrases, such as ‘diy haircut’ or ‘children’s hairdressing’. You can then use these ideas to put together titles and content, with the added benefit of knowing how popular these keywords are and how much people search for them.
- Google Trends and Alerts – take advantage of the free tools provided by Google and create some ‘alerts’ for relevant topics. You’ll receive an email notifying you of new content posted about this topic and a link to the source. Google Trends can be useful in showing you what’s popular at the moment and can be specified to a particular area or time period. This can help you attract more readers who are following these trends.
- Delicious – if you haven’t heard of Delicious, then it’s worth setting yourself up an account and taking a look around. It’s a similar idea to Google Trends, Delicious allows you to browse through all of the recent popular news and content that everyone’s talking about online. You can link it up to your Twitter account and post anything you find interesting straight to your followers.
- Evernote – Great ideas can be easily forgotten, so Evernote allows you to store content that you find interesting. Gradually build up a collection of interesting pieces throughout the month, so when it comes to putting together your next blog post or news article, you have plenty of inspiration to choose from.