7 content ideas we’ve found successful and how they can work for your content

Well-known fact: content is king of the internet. Everyone is creating and sharing it constantly, but it’s the creating part that is trickier to pull off for long periods of time. After a while, your content marketing may suffer from fatigue, creative differences, or your blog has plateaued traffic-wise. Maybe it’s just a case of writer’s block, even if you have all of the data and strategy in front of you. Maybe you need to revisit your content strategy.

Or maybe, you could try changing up the form of the content you produce. As the great Albert Einstein once said, “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” There are hundreds of new content ideas you can implement into your content strategy, but we’ve found that these ideas have proven very successful for our blog. To keep your content fresh and engaging, try out these Quietly-approved content ideas.

1. Create a new blog series

New series can inject life into your blog and branch out its capabilities beyond the niche of your content. A blog or brand centered on food photography, for example, could have a series of cooking classes or how to photograph live food events. The point of creating a new series for your blog is to extend your content marketing and social strategy and broaden it for mass appeal.

When making a new blog series, make sure it stands out and stands together. You’ll want to write a disclaimer/series intro to use for each content piece in the same series as a way to promote others like it. You may even want to create an image template so they connect image-wise, like the one we made below.

For reference: We have written several series on the Quietly blog, including the ever-so-eloquently named “stuff we use” series, where we list and review our favorite tools and services. “How to Be a Writer” is an ongoing series for digital writers and freelancers. And finally, “Word Play” is a (mostly) completed series focused on the intricacies of grammar in the English language.

2. Roundup

Since we all suffer from FOMO in one way or another, recaps are a sure-fire way to draw some eyeballs and interest to your blog and social channels. Recaps are great for timely events in your industry, including coverage of webinars, live events and news. They’re also great posts to remind you of history. Articles like “8 thing you might have missed from [conference]” or “What we learned from [event]” are often found to be popular. Roundups are generally quick to write and are essential to fill out your timely content. An extension of roundups could be “history” or retrospective pieces. “A timeline of [topic]” or “A short history of [concept].”

For reference: Our round-up pieces include product recaps and the occasional industry roundup, like “Quietly’s year in review: 2014.”

3. Personal

People connect to personal stories. Depending on your blog and brand identity, you’ll need to determine if personal blog posts are right for your content. And then, how personal? Are we talking teenage internet diary, personal, or helpful essays? Op-ed pieces? Personal experiences using product A and service B? It all depends on your content strategy.

For reference: The most personal we get on this blog, for example, is our “How to Be a writer” series, and arguably this post. We’ll be incorporating more personal pieces that still fit in with our brand in blog posts to come.

4. Q&A

As a blogger on ProBlogger once noted: “Taking note of questions is something that you need to get in the habit of noticing, capturing, and responding to—once you get into this mindset you’ll have a never-ending supply of ideas.” Excellent advice!

Questions are a part of human nature; if you can answer questions for people on your blog, all the better. It’s very likely that you already get emails from readers, comments on posts, interactions on social media, and real-life conversations from people asking what’s what, why this happened, how this works, etc. Answer questions in a blog post in a straightforward Q&A, or you could just frame a piece of content in the form of questions and answers. If you can answer these questions to explain, inform and educate your readers, then you are golden.

For reference: Our article “5 questions about Creative Commons, answered” does the job of educating blog readers about the advantages and disadvantages of using Creative Commons images. It also tells you exactly what the article is supposed to be about, which is how you write a headline to begin with. It’s one of our more successful posts!

5. Guest blogger posts

Guest blogging is a great way to intersect goals between a writer and the publisher. Writers like to get their name out there as an established authority in the industry, grab exposure for their site, and build backlinks. (Though, guest blogging strictly for backlinks is considered very spammy SEO these days.)

Opening up your blog to outsiders, freelancers, friends, and peers via guests benefits your blog in a lot of ways, including:

• Saving you time on content creation
• Gaining new traffic from the writer’s readers
• Adding a new perspective and voice into the mix
• Allowing you to network better within the community

For reference: We had a lovely experience with Betty Zhang, who wrote “How to Be a Writer: choosing your specialty as a writer.” We are always looking for guest writers to come in and write for the Quietly blog. You can email us or message us on Twitter or Facebook.

6. Tutorials

With tutorials, you can play it safe or get very creative. Tutorials show you are an expert or authority in your field. Tutorials are great for people jumping into the industry who want to learn about it. Remember that they are probably typing this search query into Google, so make sure your tutorials are very SEO-friendly and straightforward.

The opportunity to get creative arises when you decide to go negative or funny. “# things you’re doing wrote with SEO and how to fix it” induces panic mode for your readership. What am I doing wrong?! It’s a stronger way, sometimes, to frame a tutorial—but these tutorials tend to be more advanced than the straightforward ones. You can also choose to make a humorous tutorial that nails an unspoken sentiment or idea (see: The Onion, Reductress, etc.) 

For reference: Our unofficial “Best practices” series acts as a tutorial for users trying to learn about social media networks, including “Stay weird on the internet: best practices for Tumblr,” “Small details that make a big difference: Medium best practices” and “Let’s talk meta: metadata best practices.”

7. Lists

What would a list post (about blog ideas) be without an entry about lists? Did that make sense? Either way, everybody loves lists—brains, the internet, and now the publishing world (sort of). If you can create lists that are relevant and entertaining, then you are creating share-worthy content.

For reference: Not that you need a reference since lists are everywhere, but on the Quietly blog we choose to compile handy references in lists with post like “20 free WordPress plugins to try on your site” to or “18 ways to beat writer’s block.”

That’s it so far! We’re constantly trying to come up with new content ideas that fit our blog’s identity and our brand, but we wanted to share the ones that work for us with you.

Image: Brian A Jackson/Shutterstock