8 Places to Find Fresh Content Ideas, and Why You Should Bother

Yesterday I wrote about doing long tail keyword research for the purposes of niche marketing. I am at the stage in my own projects where I am ready to begin content creation so today I want to talk a bit about why fresh content is so important, and where and how I find it.

Why is Fresh Content so Important?

Take a look at these two graphs:

They show the first couple of weeks worth of traffic for one site in each of the two niches that I worked on in the August 30DC. As you can clearly see, there was an initial surge of traffic followed by a steady decline. The first page does still get the odd handful of visitors here and there but the second one is dead.

These traffic levels correspond perfectly with the position in Google at which these two pages appear for the content phrase they are optimised for. The dead one did reach position #10 a couple of days after submission but is now nowhere to be seen in the top 100 results.

This page was submitted, as is, and then left. I added all the content in one go and I did not create any backlinks to it. The fact that it slid down the results so far is proof that Google now considers this site to be dead and so it gives it less importance and ranks it lower.

It becomes apparent to me that we need to create content on a regular basis. At least that is the case for a new site - an existing site with many backlinks may be able to get away with less regular updates. However, building backlinks is very hard and time consuming so this is not something I would want to do aggressively unless that niche had already proven itself to be profitable.

Finding Fresh Content

I’ve established that I’m going to need lots of fresh content so now I need to find ideas. Unless the niche is something that I am intimately familiar with and can just write about on my own (none of them have fallen into that category so far) I need to get some ideas from somewhere else. Note that I’m not stealing anybody’s content here - just learning about the subject and getting ideas for topics that I can write about in my own way.

1) Good Old Google Web Search

The most obvious one right? Presumably if you have already done some keyword research then you would already be fairly familiar with the handful of sites at the top of the results for your target phrases. If not - go look at these now. These are the sites that you are directly competing with. What are they writing about? Are those sites regularly updated or just static pages that havent changed in months?

2) Google Blog Search

This is my favourite method because I just love blogs - they give you a stream of fresh ideas and there are blogs on just about everything these days. I use the Google blog search mainly but there are others. Here’s a selection:

http://blogsearch.google.com/
http://www.blogsearchengine.com/
http://www.blog-search.com/
http://www.ysearchblog.com/

3) Google News Search

Not all niches will turn up news items and I sometimes find that if a niche is well covered by blogs then they tend to pick up the news items and blog about them so this is often redundant. But at the start I like to find all the information I can get and then filter it out over time. I use Google’s service but again, there are others:

http://news.google.com/
http://news.yahoo.com/
http://www.excite.co.uk/search/news

4) Technorati

People submit their favourite blogs to Technorati so this is a great place to look for popular blogs. The biggest difference between this and a regular blog search on something like Google is that Technorati is user driven so you are more likely to turn up posts that people actually like to read.

http://technorati.com/

5) Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking tool. People submit posts, pages, sites, whatever to delicious using various tags as a replacement for the traditional browser bookmarks. Most people have their bookmarks public which makes it another great place to search for user driven content like Technorati.

http://del.icio.us/

6) Forums

Not all niches will have forums, but there’s only one way to find out and that’s to look. I don’t have any clever techniques here I simply go to Google and type in “<niche> forum” for example “speed reading forum”. The results tend to be mostly individual forum posts but from here you can see what the forum is about.

Forums are a tricky beast because to find the content you need to actually read the forum! This can be time consuming but there’s a major upside - many forums are full of fanatics about the subject area. These people are knowledgeable and they like to share so you can find some really good information there. It’s a great way to learn about your niche.

7) StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is my largest traffic source for this blog! As a result I’ve been making a conscious effort to learn more about it. When you click the stumble button you can first select a channel to filter your results. You will be presented with a drop down of interests that you selected in your profile, but there is also a search box here into which you can type any phrase.

Type in a phrase for your niche and then click the stumble button and it will bring back results that have been tagged with that phrase. At least that’s how I think it works. I like this because it’s just fun - rather than looking at the same boring list of Google search results I can get something new every time.

8) Facebook Groups

Facebook is so massive that there are now groups on just about any topic imaginable! Even my most unlikely niche, the playdough one, had 73 search results in groups in Facebook! Some of them were just silly but there’s some good stuff in there. I have found tons of Facebook groups for all three of my new niches.

This content source is much like forums - you need to get in there and read through the content. It’s not going to just arrive in your RSS reader.

Aggregating Some of that Content

I have mentioned this already in an earlier post - Google Alerts. Google provides the alert service which will use your search terms to look for items in web sites, news and blog results. So it aggregates together the content from the first three items I mentioned. Of course this is only for Google results.

What I do, is as soon as I start looking at a potential market I set up an alert for it. I set up alerts for my three niches over a week ago so this now gives me an idea of the level of activity in those markets. I’m looking for lots of activity because this gives me confidence that I’ll be able to continue to find fresh content on a regular basis.

Outsourcing Content Creation

So far this entire post has been about finding content ideas so that you can write your content yourself. This is where I am at right now. I actually like writing so I quite enjoy the content creation process but if I got to a point where I had several successful niches and maintaining them was become time consuming then I would start looking at outsourcing. Right now I have absolutely no experience in this area but I’ll be sure to blog about it if I do it.

I’m sure there are many more, I’d love to hear of other places where you go to get content ideas.

Stumble it!