How do you find your ideas for content

[ATP]

Morning Mozzers,

We have finally come to the point where we can start to focus on making good original content.

We were wondering how you guys come up with ideas for your content. We are currently doing lots of keyword research to gather ideas and subject areas. But we are struggling with 'angles of attack'.

Being an eCommerce site it is easy to do lots of "The 5 best products for this" type of content. But we feel there is limited value in these especially if we want to gain links to our articles in future as valued content.

How do you come up with your ideas for more valuable and linkable content especially in very niche product areas.

Thanks all.

[MattRoney]

We've actually had a couple Mozinars on this topic recently.

Practical Content Skills to Improve Creativity and Idea Generation by Shelli Walsh

Content Creation for the Real World by Joel Klettke

[Deacyde]

Like the 1st post mentions, Content is all about being helpful, humor and facts can only go so far and really in niche industries, you're most likely not going to create some viral sensations.

With that being said, there is no reason that you can't be the goto in your niche for answers.

I'd focus on any content that can help assist your customers to make better more informed decisions of their purchase. This provides trust as well as useful information, allowing the customer to believe in your site more and most times to purchase from you.

But the content that is designed to help needs to span from the beginner to the expert consumer. Nothing can be too redundant or advanced, but just throwing up a few frequently asked questions isn't going to cut it. You want to shower the helpful content and make it easy to find, even located on its own page or on the page it most relates too.

Best way to do this, either look at your content and products from a newbie point of view or if you can't grab someone who doesn't work with those products ( like a family member or friend ) have them take a look and ask them what they get and what they don't. Ask them if they had to come up with x amount of questions, what would they be. Go from them, you can really get a great feel of how users are viewing your site this way.

Hope this helps!

[O2C]

Use MOZ Content of course!

[EGOL]

If you are a retailer you probably get lots of questions about how to select a product, how to use it, how to fix it, which one is best in this situation, etc.  These are good topics to write about.  Visitors will find them on your site and not need to contact you.  If someone emails with a question, you can reply, we have an article about that here.  These articles will rank for those queries in search and the people who read them can be monetized with adsense or house ads that offer relevant upgrades and accessories.

Answer the most frequent questions, answer the important questions that people are not asking, write about interesting product stuff that people don't know.  Try to keep these articles on evergreen topics.  You want your writing to be relevant for years rather than be out-of-date in a few months.