post its How To Come Up With 100+ Content Ideas In 10 Minutes

In the past two years, Google has really stepped up its game in pushing businesses to develop quality to provide an overall lift in its search experience. Content marketing, a technique that has been around for a very long time, started seeing an uptick as more and more internet marketers understood the need to actually deliver more value to readers rather than spam the system

How To Come Up With 100+ Content Ideas In 10 Minutes

Notice the uptick in interest after Panda (2011) and Penguin (2012) hit. Now let’s look at how ‘link building‘ takes a downturn:

The fact is great content pays off

A study by Kapost and Eloqua found that content marketing cost-per-lead was $32.25 as opposed to $111.11 for paid search.
A HubSpot report found that organic search leads have a 14.6% conversion rate, while outbound marketing leads have a 1.7% conversion rate.
Nielsen research found that 67% of consumers were more likely to buy a new product if they found it through an online search.

Curated by Content Marketing Institute

Good examples of content marketing

QuickSprout – Neil Patel is spending over $105,000 to develop free internet marketing tools.
REI – REI has an entire section dedicated to giving people tips on the outdoors.
Zappos – E-commerce giant Zappos created over 50,000 product videos to help improve the shopping experience for visitors.
Coca Cola – Coca Cola has made it very clear that they’re investing into content plus described how they plan on doing it.
How I Increased My Website to 100,000 Visitors In Less Than a Year – perfect case study that shows the value of content and is a great example of a good title and superb content that delivers value to its readers.

How To Actually Come Up With 100+ Content Marketing Ideas

Now that you have a better idea of the effectiveness of content marketing, how do you actually continue to come up with ideas?

1. Don’t Try To Do It Alone

Don’t try to shoulder the burden of creating all the ideas by yourself if you work with a team of people. Trying to go at it alone leads to unnecessary stress and also stunts creativity. I always like to look around and see if I can build upon great content that’s already out there.

2. Get Your Team Into A Room

Unbounce CEO Rick Perreault told me that his Creative Director likes to get people into a room to think of ideas. The first step is to have everyone present and have the topic at hand. There will be a moderator (typically the Managing Editor or Head of Content) that will help steer the meeting in the right direction.

If your team is remote, get them into a Google Hangout.

3. Set A Time Limit

After the moderator presents the topic, everyone is given 10-15 minutes to come up with at least 10 ideas each. If you have 10 people in the room, that’s 100 ideas.

Use a white board or if you’re using a computer, you can use Trello to create a board specifically for this exercise.

4. Moderator Picks Up The Ideas That He Likes

Although you have 100 ideas, that doesn’t mean they’re all going to be good. It’s on the moderator to pick out the ideas that have potential and move forward with them.

5. Repeat Every Month or Quarter

Every time your team needs more content ideas, just repeat this exercise. Since we produce different types of content for our clients, these brainstorming sessions are valuables. They even help when we need content for our own blog!

Conclusion

Coming up with content ideas can be draining if you try to do it all alone. Make sure that if you’re using this brainstorming tactic that you follow all of the instructions above. Bringing people into a room to focus solely on ideation is much more effective than sending an e-mail and having to scratch and claw to get a response.

Setting a time limit puts pressure on getting the ideas out quickly and doesn’t take up too much of everyone’s time. Having everyone involved makes them feel engaged and it’s fun when people feel like they’re contributing.