Content Conquered is a series of mini-posts designed to ignite content ideas and inspire you to get creative online.
We all love Pinterest, it’s brilliant. It’s where we find our face painting ideas, our cake recipes, our latest crafty projects… But it’s also a really effective tool for doing content research, whether you’re a blogger, podcaster or hardcore scoper.
When I’m looking for new ideas, I start up by creating a secret board. Secret boards are great places to store ideas and inspirations without feeling like people are spying on your process.
Next, begin the search.
Hit the search bar and type in a term relevant to your niche followed by the words “tips”. For me that might be blogging, so I’d type in blogging tips. You could also type in gardening tips, Twitter tips, painting tips or baking tips; whatever your focus is.
After hitting enter, you have the option to filter your search results by pins, boards and users – click boards. The other two will leave you with some pretty vague results, but boards have been collated with a specific focus in mind. In other words, someone else is doing half the work for you, and you’re not going to end up looking at pins with your search term in the title. Dude, that’s limiting.
Click on a board that catches your eye and peruse the pins. Don’t even click through. Just look at the titles. How could you write those posts in your own way?
Let’s try a few of examples:
Productivity
I’ve typed in “productivity tips” and clicked on Becky Mollenkamp’s board (I just like the cover image)
Here are the blog post titles I see straight off the bat:
- 20 busy bloggers share their #1 productivity tips
- Night routine for a productive morning
- Why you need to wake up early and how to do it without wanting to die
- How to use the habit loop to blog consistently
- How I keep my inbox at zero
- The morning routine cheatsheet
- 3 ways to prioritise and get more done
- How to organise your day for maximum productivity
Look at that first title right there. Perhaps you could get in touch with bloggers, biz buddies or past clients and ask them about their top productivity hack? The people involved will be different. The tips will be different. The writing style and format will be different. Or maybe you turn it on its head, and ask people about their #1 productivity fail and then share a helpful tip of your own.
Blogging
Now I’m trying “blogging tips”, and clicking through to Melyssa Griffin’s board.
We’ve got:
- 10 mistakes bloggers make
- 8 things nobody told me about blogging
- How to run a Twitter chat
- Photography tips for bloggers
- 10 things you need to know before becoming a full-time blogger
- 11 creative ways to build your editorial calendar
- 5 Steps to Write the Perfect E-mail Pitch.
Let’s look at that last one. I’m betting that whoever wrote that writes e-mail pitches in a completely different way to the way you do it. She probably pitches for different things, or maybe she doesn’t pitch … Maybe you don’t pitch at all, and she loves to pitch. Write about that. Maybe you’ve received a lot of really bad e-mail pitches in the past, I know I have. Write about the 10 things not to do in your email pitch.
Regardless of what each post on your radar contains, those titles could lead on to 50 completely different articles. You still write about in your own way, with your own voice and your own content, just let them give you a little nudge.
Take this tip away and try it. How many blog post ideas can you come up with?
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