Content Ideation Is A Superpower (11 tips to be unstoppable)
You are a content artist. And one of your main jobs is to come up with great ideas – topics on tap. But eventually, you’re bound to hit a wall or two.
As normal as this is, it’s also frustrating. Luckily, there are some clever tricks to keep creativity in the mix.
This is the art of content ideation (and how to make it your superpower).
Whether you’re an artist, a content creator or a brand (or all three), these are my top moves for coming up with fresh and consistently epic ideas.
Let’s get to it.
Table of Contents Show
What Is Content Ideation?
Content ideation, or content brainstorming, is the process of coming up with quality ideas and topics, which will be the foundation for your content strategy and content library.
But it’s more than just topic ideation. It’s a holistic thing.
It’s not just coming up with ideas. It’s everything from brainstorming to outlining, drafting, content mapping and interlinking.
It’s everything leading up to the actual creation and promotion of the content itself.
Suffice to say, it’s an important piece of the content puzzle.
So what is content, anyways? As you likely know, there are three main types of content:
Visual content
Written content
Audio content
Each content type will have its own nuances, such as short-form micro content vs long-form or BOFU vs TOFU content.
And using more than one type of content is a smart move for brand development, better accessibility and improving your SEO. Luckily, there are tools to make this easier.
For example, Wondercraft AI can effortlessly turn text into podcast-style audio, using your own voice! It’s pretty cool (and something I’ll be adding on this blog soon).
But let’s keep moving and look at the importance and benefits of improving your content ideation skills.
Recommended: Creative Content Is Just Better (11 tips)
Why Content Brainstorming Is Important
There’s certainly no shortage of content online. But how much is there? And will there ever be enough?
According to HubSpot, Google alone processes over 8.5 billion searches everyday and over 80% of people use the platform more than three times per day.
And when it comes to social media, the leading platforms (such as TikTok and Instagram) all have an active user base in the billions.
So that’s a lot of people consuming a lot of content. And the demand for fresh content is high.
It is my thesis that there is more demand than there is supply.
For example, only 18% of websites are actually active and around 15% of Google searches are unique (or have never been searched before).
And beyond traditional SEO, social media content typically doesn’t last long (with the exception of YouTube). While older videos can get picked up, trends are dynamic and fresh content is always needed.
This is why content ideation is a skill that’s always needed (almost daily).
People want fresh content. Even if the ideas are old, the perspective, tone of voice or creator face is new.
How Content Ideation Helps You (7 benefits)
Content is like food for your brand. We need it to survive and thrive.
Love it or hate it, that’s just the reality we live in now. But personally, I think this is a good thing.
Although there are plenty of negatives (comparison culture, creative anxiety, etc.), there are also more opportunities than ever before.
Anyone can become a successful content creator. You just need a smartphone.
If you’re a creative, have a blog, run a business or you just want to increase your traffic online, then content creation is simply something you need to pay attention to.
So here are some top reasons why ideation (a key part of content creation) is important.
Your Ideas Get Better
Not every idea will be a winner. And ideation is a process of qualitative filtering.
You’ll naturally expand on ideas that resonate and have opportunity, while scrapping the ones that don’t.
Content ideation requires organization (such as keeping a document for all your ideas). This creates important intention and more clarity, which will optimize your topics and send the best ones to the top.
This is probably the first benefit you’ll notice with content brainstorming.
You Optimize Your Content System
Topic brainstorming creates a better, more efficient content system.
Through continuous research, ideation and iteration, you’re naturally optimizing your processes. You’ll discover errors, gaps and more, which will better align your topics with your goals.
Basically, what we’re doing here is like total quality management, but for content marketing.
Your Content Consistency Improves
As your ideation skills improve, you’ll soon have more topics than you know what to do with.
This helps ensure you’ll stay consistent, since you’ll never run out of ideas to pull from.
So your content calendar will never be empty. Building out a consistent, long-term content strategy is much easier when you have hundreds (or thousands) of topics to pull from.
You Boost Collaboration (+ engagement)
Often, brainstorming is a team sport.
While this benefit is slightly geared towards brands with a team, solo creators can feel this too.
Content ideation is a great way to boost engagement and participation in the content process. Whether it’s an artist collab or creating a team ideation thread to share ideas on, content brainstorming is highly engaging and collaborative.
You Become More Adaptive
As the saying goes, the only constant is change. And content creation is no exception.
Brainstorming is part creativity and part research. Exploring the trends and changes in your niche is essential for effective ideation (and to just stay relevant).
Ultimately, ideation boosts your insights and makes you more agile and adaptable.
You Get Organized
A major benefit of brainstorming is added clarity and organization.
Creating content without a plan is confusing not only for you, but also for your audience and platform algorithms.
Topic brainstorming naturally adds structure to things. Through the ideation process, you create a content map and plan your topics accordingly.
Your Brand Gets Stronger
What makes a strong brand?
Of course, there are many things, but one key piece of the puzzle is recognizable content. And sharpening your ideation skills helps a lot here.
Better ideas create better content and consistent themes. And this creates a stronger brand.
(not to sound too reductionist on how to build a brand or anything…)
Recommended: Branding for Creatives (my guide)
How to Do Content Ideation (11 epic tips)
Our minds process over 60,000 thoughts per day. From daydreams to problem solving, we’re constantly thinking – so you are already a brainstorming expert, naturally.
But the trick is in learning how to control and organize this brain behavior.
So let’s look at how to do content ideation like a seasoned pro.
1. Start With Your Audience
The best place to start for great content is with your audience. After all, they are the ones who will be consuming it.
So in coming up with ideas, consider questions like:
What are your audience’s pain points?
What are their interests and passions?
How about their values?
What important demographic information do you have?
Getting ultra clear on these questions will make your ideation process much smoother.
It can also help to create an audience avatar here. This is a document that outlines the key character traits of your ideal target reader or customer.
Whether it’s for content or not, getting to know your audience better is always a smart move.
2. Stay Organized
Brainstorming without organization is a great way to cause headaches. So let’s avoid that by organizing your content plan.
Creating a simple Google Doc that’s categorized by main themes and subtopics (which represent different subsets of my audience) is how I organize my topics.
For example, let’s say you have a music blog and your audience is singer-songwriters. Some of your audience subsets may include singers, guitarists and bedroom music producers.
Naturally, each of these subsets will have their own unique topics. This is strategic brainstorming and a key part of a successful content strategy.
So the next time you have a great idea, make sure you write it down, but also give it a home that makes the most sense.
3. Use Google (3 different ways to use it)
Using Google for anything related to content is staple advice. But we can go well beyond just using the search bar.
There are three core ways I like to use Google for brainstorming and analysis:
Google Search
Google Trends + Keyword Planner
Google Bard
Let’s unpack each of these.
Using Google Search
What better place to brainstorm content than with the most popular search engine worldwide?
With a market share of over 80%, most people are using Google for their searches. But content artists and brands also use it for research.
The common strategy is the alphabet soup technique. So here’s how to do it:
Start with your seed keyword
Hit space to add another word
For your second word, simply cycle through the letters of the alphabet
Look at what Google autocompletes for each letter
Play around with prepositions (with, for, etc.)
Hit enter for phrases that stick out
Explore the search results page for more ideas
You can also audit ranking websites for more inspiration.
And don’t forget to check out the “Related searches” and “People also ask” sections either!
Using Google Trends + Keyword Planner
Both Google Trends and its Keyword Planner are great places to discover topics.
Google Trends helps you analyze searches over time, compare and contrast them and provides related queries and topics as well. You can try it out for free here.
Google Keyword Planner is great for researching keywords. Its main purpose is to guide your ads campaign, but you can also use it for content ideation.
You’ll just need to sign up for a Google Ads account. You can learn more about using Keyword Planner here.
Using Google Bard
Finally, we have Google Bard, which is an AI chatbot, similar to ChatGPT (but connected to the internet).
This is a new way to use Google for content ideation (and SEO and content planning). It was inspired by this article from Search Engine Land.
For the purposes of content brainstorming, you can use prompts in Bard to analyze websites (including your own) to uncover content gaps, competition information and opportunities.
For example, you can prompt Bard to find gaps with something like:
“Analyze [competitor or website name] in the [your niche] keyword niche and provide information on their keyword use and any content gaps.”
You can try out Bard here.
Regardless of how you use Google, it’s an awesome place to find ideas, learn what works in your niche and discover subtopics for drafting outlines.
4. Use Social Media
Social media is an awesome way to find topics. It’s where the world spends its digital time, after all (besides Google).
So my best advice is to think about your audience and where they spend the most amount of time. Spreading yourself too thin (by trying to monitor too many places) can lead to burnout.
I like to focus on just one or two platforms by deep diving into the nuances, trends and types of content that perform well.
The idea here is to become a genuine user first (with a researcher’s intention). You can monitor what’s working and what’s popular.
You can also use research tools like TikTok Insights or Ahrefs again (for YouTube).
But as social media continue to dominate (and as more people use it as a search engine and shopping experience), it’s a content type you don’t want to look past.
No doubt, combining a solid social media content plan with a blog strategy can amplify your marketing efforts and influence.
5. Use AI
Our brains shouldn’t do all the heavy lifting. There are plenty of awesome tools to make life much easier.
I mean, we have the technology. So let’s use it.
The most obvious tool these days is AI. For content ideation, this is perfect. From ChatGPT to Perplexity or Google Bard, these are amazing resources for brainstorming ideas.
Leveraging AI saves you time, boosts your creativity and uncovers fresh content ideas and angles.
But just remember to be careful if you’re using AI to create the actual content for you. Unless you’re a pro with prompts, the output can often be generic (or even inaccurate).
Also, Google prioritizes hands-on experience and uses it as a core ranking factor in their E-E-A-T guidelines (it’s the first E).
So artificial intelligence is awesome for ideation, streamlining things and getting some inspiration.
But be wary of having it write for you (or at least edit it thoroughly).
Recommended: How to Measure Creativity Using KCIs
6. Use Community Forums
Community forums are a treasure trove for content ideas.
Places like Reddit and Quora pick up where search engines leave off. They answer highly specific questions that trouble audiences worldwide.
Community posts even show up in the search results when there isn’t better content to offer. So the idea here is to tap into this resource by spending some time searching through threads and sifting through comments.
You can find key insights into the types of questions people are asking and the information they crave.
You can even start your own thread or engage in the comments to understand things at an even deeper level.
7. Go Offline
A great way to brainstorm new ideas is to look for inspiration outside of the digital world.
Stepping away also reminds why and who I’m brainstorming for. There’s a real human living a real life on the other end of that content (which is why we need to make it good).
From shopping trends at physical stores to cafe conversations, real life offers fresh insights and resets my perspective on things. It’s a mix of clarity and objectivity.
It’s like taking a digital break (which is also important to avoid digital fatigue).
I also like to practice self reflection and meditation for ideation clarity. Quieting the mind always helps.
Whatever the method, stepping away from the computer is a solid way to stay connected and take a break from all the digital noise, best practices and swirling trends constantly filling our feeds.
After all, aha moments tend to come when we’re not forcing it. This is when our minds can subconsciously connect the dots.
And for that, we need to step away.
(but first, finish this article :] )
8. Think Like A Storyteller
Storytelling is a bit of a buzzword these days – but for good reason!
Audiences connect with (and remember) stories more. It’s the hero’s journey and the transformation that you’re offering through your content that resonates with people.
Approaching brainstorming with a story mindset means you focus more on things like emotional hooks and transformative elements.
How is my content going to help my audience go from point A to point B? What experience is my reader or viewer going to have when consuming my content?
What’s the micro story of this content and how does it fit into my bigger brand picture?
Answering these types of questions is an awesome way to improve your content quality and come up with new ideas.
So if you’re looking to boost your brainstorming agility, try approaching things like a storyteller.
From case studies to before-and-afters, a great story is a great piece of content.
9. Get Good At Keyword Research
Keywords are specific queries that people search for and have data attached to them.
So getting good at keyword research is a modern skill that will seriously elevate your ideation chops and content quality.
For keyword research, I usually start with an idea and then head over to Google.
I consider how people would search for this idea in Google and then I see what Google autocompletes for my search.
I keep a list of the top hits and I pay special attention to long-tail phrases, which often indicate less competition (which is important if your content style is blogging).
After I find multiple keyword search variations of my topic, I add some data to things. I want to know the monthly search volume and the competition.
This tells me how popular a search term is and how difficult it would be to create content on the topic and rank for it. I use Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator for this part (which is completely free).
But if you pay for Ahrefs, you’ll unlock awesome features for ideation. For every seed keywords, you can explore hundreds (or thousands) of “matching” keywords or “related keywords”.
It’s a treasure trove of content ideas. And there are cheaper tools too, such as AnswerThePublic or UberSuggest.
Either way, getting good at keyword research means you get good at content ideation as well. They go hand in hand.
10. Look for Gaps + Undeveloped Topics
Looking for gaps means two things:
Finding gaps in your existing content
What topics have you not covered in detail yet?
What topics perform best or is your audience craving more?
Finding gaps in your niche
What topics have other creators not covered?
Or, what topics have not been covered well enough?
To find gaps in your niche, you can research your competition by analyzing the comments of their content.
Alternatively, you can do a site search on Google or use Google Bard to scrape website blog data and find gaps and topics not yet covered.
To find gaps in your own content, you can also do a site search in Google (for blog content) or survey your existing audience to see what’s missing or what they like best.
Alternatively, you can explore your content data (on whichever platform you’re using) to get deeper insights into which content performs best with your audience.
Double down on topics that perform well by expanding on them further or offering updated insights.
For example, if this topic of “content ideation” performs well, I can expand in various ways, such as:
Ideation examples
Ideation process
Ideation tools
Ideation for specific platforms or audience groups
11. Add Your Twist
This last tip is similar to filling gaps in your niche. But while there’s no shame in “copying” content ideas that perform well, it’s important to add your own voice and experience to the mix.
Rest assured, there’s space for you to share your unique experience and perspectives.
Copying content and ideas verbatim (while claiming them to be your own) isn’t a good strategy, and people will notice (eventually).
So lean into your authenticity ideating for a topic that’s already been covered a lot. This means leaning in on your unique experience, expertise, perspectives and/or hot takes.
And if you’re worried about copying other people too much, stress not. It’s way harder to copy someone completely than to let your own voice naturally shine through.
As John Mayer once echoed (from a random interview I can no longer find), failing at trying to be someone else is a fantastic way to find yourself.
So copy, but don’t forget to add your unique angles.
Conclusion
Content ideation is a superpower. It adds clarity and strategy to elevate your stuff from meh to memorable.
Search engines like Google are constantly being fed new questions and queries every single day and social media demands a constant stream of fresh posts.
So topic ideation is a dynamic and ongoing thing.
With your expertise (and the tips in this guide), you’re well on your way to showing up for people at exactly the right time with exactly the right content.
So thanks for stopping by today – and happy ideating!
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