Creating content isn’t necessarily about having the best idea or the best brainstorming – it’s about figuring out a formula that works for you. It’s about taking the inputs that you’re already familiar with, putting them into a formula, and then repeating them over and over and over again with different variations.
So if you’re stuck in a rut and just can’t seem to create content ideas for your blog or business, I’m gonna share with you some ways that you can create a content plan in a limited amount of time.
Find and stack keywords
Let’s say that you’re a pilates instructor and you’re trying to figure out how to get started with creating content. You can go to Google, type in “pilates” and take a look at those search terms that are showing up in the autocomplete. Maybe you decide that half of these ideas can end up being blog posts to get you started.:
- What’s the difference between pilates and yoga?
- What are some benefits of doing pilates?
- What kind of machines/equipment should I use for pilates?
- Should I go to a pilates reformer class?
Another place to look for those ideas that can stack on top of each other is to come to the “People also ask” section
As you click through these related questions, you can use these topics to build on each other. Google recognizes that these topics are related to each other so you could use this information to create two or three different blog posts and then link these posts to a bigger blog post.
You don’t necessarily have to address every question all at once in just one blog post – you can answer each query in a separate post and then tie them together.
Use the Keywords Everywhere tool to build content ideas
You can also use the Keywords Everywhere tool to find additional related keywords. You can use the keywords that people are already searching for to build out your plan and then link them all together into some sort of larger post like, “12 Pilates Exercises That Really Work Your Core.”
If you want more tips on how to generate these content ideas, I go into more detail on that here.
If you’re just getting started with blogging you may want to just pick an idea out of the air and create a content plan based on the keywords on the Google search engine results page or some of these other SEO and keyword research tools.
Finding new content ideas from your current keywords
But if you’ve been blogging for a while you can actually take the content that you’ve already produced and build on that in a different way.
Last year during one of our group coaching sessions in my Attract and Activate coaching calls we were looking at our Google Search Console and one of my students Annie found some really amazing keywords that she’s going to build on. Annie is a career coach for lawyers. One of the specific decisions that she helps her clients make is whether they want to work in a law firm or be an in-house counsel and as we were looking through Annie’s keywords, we found that one of Annie’s top blog posts is all about how lawyers can write better resumes.
So as we were looking through her specific keywords and thinking about any opportunities that we saw for that post or any ways that she could optimize her existing content more, we noticed something that didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the keywords.
Annie was ranking for the search term “cover letter for in-house counsel position” which is such a specific keyword. And it’s a perfect keyword to build a blog post off of because she wants to be attracting those people who are writing cover letters for in-house counsel positions.
So we looked through all of Annie’s keywords for any more keywords that she was already ranking for about being an in-house counsel. And so knowing that we had those keywords that Annie was already looking for, then we went on the quest to find the supporting keywords for it and the future blog post that we were going to write.
Just in looking at those auto-complete suggestions, we have some more ideas of things that Annie might be able to be found for in terms of in-house counsels.
And if we turned on Keywords Everywhere on top of Google Search Console we can get even more ideas of the things that Annie could be talking about.
So by figuring out what the specific questions are that people have when they’re thinking about applying for a job as an in-house counsel she could create a blog post about exactly what the target keyword was that set us down these paths.
Planning SEO content for a detailed topic
So if you’re feeling stuck about what you should be writing, come up with a general idea or theme, dig into the search engine results, the auto complete options, the “People also ask” options and figure out if there’s a way that each one of those could potentially be a blog post for you. Then you can go into as much detail as you need to about that specific topic.
Planning your SEO content doesn’t have to take forever and it doesn’t have to be super complex. You can take these specific keyword ideas, plan them into blog posts and then optimize them using the eight step blogging process.
So you don’t have to spend hours and hours doing all your keyword research. If you start with just one idea, you could come up with four or five related keywords and create about a month’s worth of content ideas in about 15 or 20 minutes.