Where to find ideas for web content
Effective social media marketing needs a constant supply of high quality, unique, SEO rich content for web pages and blogs to push your small business up the search rankings. Google updated their search algorithm to make new and recently updated content more important to their search bots. This means that sites with new or revised content do better than sites that are left gathering dust!
To maximise your chances of getting a good listing you’ll need to refresh your web content regularly, put up new pages, include images and captions, as well as make sure your pages hit the right keywords. Creating new content can be tricky if you find it difficult to come up with ideas. To help you get the words flowing, we’ve put together a list of six easy ways to get ideas and inspiration to help you flex your content writing muscles.
1. RSS feeds, (Really Simple Syndication), allow you to subscribe to a web site and receive notifications every time a site updates its content. Subscribing to news sites -like – BBC or ITV news - ensure you get updates on the day’s news. Once installed your RSS reader will collect all your RSS feeds and then you can browse new information relevant to your blog or website as it comes in, helping you find ideas to create up-to-date content for your website. If you haven’t already install a RSS reader in your browser it’s easy to do, most browsers will have an option to include a reader in the tool bar or as an extension, in chrome for example find Google Reader in the Chrome app store. Then when you find a website relevant to your content, look for the orange RSS button on web sites to add their news to your reader.
2. Google news provides up-to-date news coverage, from sources all over the world, that could help you write up stories from your own perspective and create new content for your website that are relevant to your business and your content marketing strategy.
3. Google alerts are emails that notify you when there are new Google results for your search terms. It’s like having the results of your own Google search sent to you every day as an email. The email will give you a list of news stories and websites that are relevant to your search term. To sign up for these alerts, go to the Google Alerts home page, enter your search, the type of alert you would like, and how often you would like to get these alerts. Google alerts provide you with updates of latest relevant Google results according to the topic you choose, allowing you to use the most up-to-date information to create your web content. As well as keeping you updated, Google alerts are handy for keeping you upt to date with what your competitors as they pull in pages and news written with the same keywords.
4. LinkedIn Groups if you’re not on LinkedIn you need to be! It’s the largest network of people in business and a great way to keep up with your own business network, meet new business contacts, win business and build your reputation. Subscribing to groups relevant to your industry, profession, location or interests allows you to see what others are talking about, what news items are creating a stir and they may give you some good ideas for content. You can post a topic or a question in groups and then use the responses for writing content. As well as the discussions, they also allow you to connect with other professionals so you can extend your own network.
5. Survey Monkey, Poll Daddy and other online survey tools- online survey tools let you find out what people think, and then you can report these findings in an article or blog post. Surveys allow you as a business owner to get closer to your customers and find out what makes them tick, from they think about developments in the market to your products and services or your competitors. Setting up a survey to give you meaningful results is a bit of an art, but not too complicated – the best way to design a survey is to think about how you describe the results in your write up. Make sure the answers to your questions are meaningful, avoid ambiguous questions and make sure the choices you give people for answers are discrete (that’s to say they are distinct from each other and don’t overlap). There’s lots of good advice on the web for example, this list of tips for writing questions is excellent.
6. Blogs- there are countless blogs with great web content that could provide you with ideas you could adapt to your audience. You don’t want to copy other people’s ideas directly, that’s plagiarism, but you can use some of the ideas – for example new ideas for lists - as a way in to writing your own unique content.
Finally, there are loads of resources for writing, editing and generating content with SEO in mind. On twitter the hashtag #writing and #editing will put you in touch with others wrestling with their writing and of course you can keep up with the latest on search engines with #SEO. There are all kinds of hang outs for writers and business writers, just Google to find something that suits you. And if you’d like to do an online course in writing for the web Rachel McAlpine down under in New Zealand has been offering an excellent course on writing for the web for over ten years that’s easy and straightforward for even the most reluctant web writer.