How do you find content to write about?

You can visit Yahoo Answers and see what people are talking about, also read the newspaper to see whether there is anything interesting to write about in your blogs.

What is your blog about? like any specific niche?

I agree with DotcomBum look around Yahoo News or google news and see what are the people taking about. pick 2-3 topics and write unique articles and post on your blog

You can find PLR articles related to your topic and re write them and add your own spin on them to make it unique.

I get my ideas mainly from mashable. mashable content goes viral pretty quickly. I want to make sure my time is well-spend writing article/blog-post which has a high probability of going viral. Basically, I love writing epic shit.. Write Epic Shit

The IM and or Blogging industry is a "Copy Cat" game. Am I telling you to copy other imer's and bloggers? NO. I am simply saying that you should get inspiration from your competitors and other authority figures in your market or niche.

Find your own unique way of saying something that's already been said a hundred times over. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. For instance, there are hundreds of wso's and product launches that get released every single month. Guess what? Most of them are basically saying the same thing with an individual twist to them.

It is very important that as much as you want to profit -you need to make sure you have interest in what you are doing. Viewers can easily find out if you feel otherwise because its gonna show on your posts.

Tips:
1.Write 5 things that interests you.
2. Check for affiliate offers that relate to those five.
3. then, Get a pen and free your imagination.
Things will be easier and fun this way.

Cheers!

Well....Im an avid reader. I read books (paper copies mostly), blogs, articles online and read magazines, news both online and offline. It sought just keeps the stuff ready acting as a research in the making for something I write few days down the line. I have a notes where I keep scribbling both interesting and boring stuff, sometimes. It helped me when I turned back pages few weeks later. It sought of keeps me engaged. Though I cant say its a systematic preparation, I can say this is the way it works for me as research becomes implicit part of my almost daily routine.

I believe the most important thing to do first is find out what your market (audience) wants to know. Then you go about learning about it and then you write about that.

That's why market research is so important. Market research consists of learning about the people in your (niche) market. Some have suggested Yahoo Answers. You can also go to Quantcast.com and enter the domains of the authority sites in your niche. You'll get demographics breakdowns: age groups, education, income levels, etc. It's good to know those things because they provide some insights into your market.

You can go to Alexa.com and learn more about your market demographics. Enter the domain names for the same sites and then scroll down and you'll see some information.

If there are magazines for your market, then go to the library and read as much as you can stand. Take a notebook. Check out the letters to the editors and all the articles. Read them because those articles are professionally researched. The magazine industry is extremely tough and competitive. So they don't mess around - my point is they'll be writing about the things their market, and yours, cares about.

Then you can distill the issues, problems, concerns, and all those things. And that is what your audience wants to know.

Then you can discern or glean some keywords. Do kw research and and perhaps include related terms. Maybe will lead to more relevant topics.

Create a bunch of Google Alerts about the topics of concern you're aware of. Select source to news and not necessarily blogs. You don't want to write about the things everyone else is.

Keep an eye on what's trending in your market. If you find anything, you should write about it and maybe you'll be one of the first to do that.

There must be books written about the issues of concerns in your market. So go to Google Books and search for books you can check out.

Go to Amazon and look up the most popular books on some of the topics in your niche. Read the Table of Contents and get ideas. Write them down. Then you can dig deeper and get lots of ideas for content.

Depending on your niche, maybe there's scientific or other academic topics - research. Then you can go to Google Scholar and maybe find some information to write about.

Related to that, find professional and academic organizations for your market. Google them and you'll find tons of high quality, authoritative information you can read and write about. Include links in your posts to the authority sites.

Go to a good library such as a university library and read magazines and get some books to get quick research from. University libraries will have copy machines and you can make a bunch of copies from the above. Take it home and read and write posts.

Go to magazine.com and search for magazines in your niche. Then go read past issues in a good library.

If you do all that, your blog will become much more unique and valuable.

You're not the one who determines what to write about, it's the people in your niche. Or at least, that's the best way to give your readers what they want to know.

Do this for six months and your blogs will become authoritative and generally killer.

You'll become rich and famous.

I think you have to plan it before building your website but still you can do the planning now. You need to make each of your blog focus on one niche for you to have your target visitors on it. Once you have your niche for each website, then you don't have a problem anymore on what to write since each of them have their own niche for you to write.

Regards,

Ronnie

Its always been my problem. I lost ideas to write about to the product i promote that's whyit get stuck. I don't have enough money to outsource.

Hello, what could help you is using google trends by choosing the category or keywords that your sites are about and then looking at what is being searched for.
Then write about it.
If you want you can create a page yourself by embedding google trends widgets so that you can have an overview of what's popular and rising in your topic.
I have made such pages by keeping it neutral/general, so that shows the most popular and rising topics without any keyword or category attached, it is not that useful as such but can be interesting if you spot something there that relate to your topic it means it is really popular..
MOST SEARCHED KEYWORDS ON GOOGLE TRENDS (GOOGLE KEYWORD INSIGHTS) - THE BEST REVIEWS ON INTERNET 2012

Another way is to look at your site's google analytics account and sort by most popular queries for the last 30 days, then write some more content about those queries. For instance if you find that most traffic come on your "blue and red widgets" page by queries such as "what is the best red widget?" then write a new page about "the top 3 best red widgets".

I'm guessing your blog is a general blog for different topics right? if so i suggest you do research on what people read most like recent updates on celebrities, fashion or something you know much about.

Find all the top blogs/websites in your niche and look through their archives. There's an endless amount of content ideas.

There are several ways to find content to write about. Let me share one of my favorite techniques to find content that Mr. Pat Flynn taught me.

1. Go to Amazon.com and type in keywords that are related to your niche. For example, if your site or eBook was about dog training, you’d type in dog training in the search field.

2. Locate the top books in the search results, and click on one of them. This will open up the page that shows you what it’s about, how much it costs, etc.

3. Look inside the cover. The cool thing that Amazon does is that it shows us the first few and the last few pages of most of their books. And what page is always shown when you “look inside”?

For example, when I clicked the cover of the particular ecover, I got the following result

The Table Of Contents

The table of contents will show you exactly what kinds of things people are talking about within that niche. So, for our Dog training example, in one of the top books, I see the following:

Part 1: Dog Training

1. My Background

2. Overview

3. Your Dog Loves Who You Are

4. The Wondrous Dog

5. Thinking adopting a dog

6. Responsibilities of Having a Dog

7. The Proper Way To Greet New Dogs

…and so on and so forth.

The above can give you ideas on what you can write about. But I don’t advise just copy each of these parts of the table of contents because it’s too general.

So for example, here are some blog post titles or chapters of eBooks that I’ve derived just from this part of the table of contents:

5 Types Training to Have An Obedient Dog

What Exactly Triggers a Dog To Respect You

Why That Dog Won’t Even Look at You

The Beginner’s Guide to Dog Training

How to Practice Dog Training

8 Dog Training Tips to Give Yourself the Best Chance to Master The Skill

Advanced Dog Training Tips – For Serious Dog Lovers Only

You get the idea.

We’re basically getting a boost of inspiration from looking inside the covers of these books. If you think about it, a lot of money went into helping the authors figure out how to organize and determine what they were going to write about, so now you can use that as your own starting point to make even better content for your eBook or blog.

So try it out. Go to Amazon, enter a keyword, look inside the covers, find the table of contents, and get inspired.

I agree with Ken. My biggest mistake at first was writing about stuff I was passionate about. Wrong answer! If you want to actually make money, research what people are searching for, that you actually have a chance at ranking for and write the best ever article or make the best ever video for that. Rinse and repeat that strategy for actual results, or you could always consult and 8 ball, or maybe use an ink blot test???

Your content must be based according to the demographics of the traffic you receive and not about some random things that come to your mind.

KenThompson's post is awesome, and should be taken as both a market research reference and writing research reference. Thank you.

I would check stumbleupon for inspiration and ideas of titles that are popular in your niche.

You can simply use this forum and see what people want and are talking about. Try the off-topic section. If it's not IM related just go and find a forum in your niche and post away. You will find content ideas. Just don't follow the crowd and steal other people's content. Thats not fair and the big G can easily spot that even if you THINK you've changed it enough.

I always look on what other people write in my niche. I take ideas and try to write after doing some research.

Yahoo Answers is a good source of topic to write on. You also can keep an eye on the recent news. You may write on burning issues that are demanded by the mass people.

Start with your core keywords and plug them into Google keyword tool. Then look for long tail keywords in the suggested KW section.

The easiest way really is to search for other online articles on other websites. Just take a couple of them and make your own out of that.

If you want to have blog articles that are going to get people visiting your site, you need to check out the various kws in your niche that are being searched for. Always do as much research as you can on a topic before blogging about it. There's no shame in looking at what your competition is doing, and following suit. That being said, you don't want to go line by line and paraphrase their posts.

I find the micro curation method to make it easier to come up with content.

You can subscribe to RSS feeds of authority blogs. You could also set up your google news and look at what important people in your niche say in social media platforms.

Then on your blog you could add 3 small paragraphs of your own for example that would comment a combination of content you would have quoted from the sources I mentioned earlier.

I like to search on Amazon for new or popular products to write reviews about if it is a review site. For the general content sections of a site then two things that are nice are to look at forums for the topic to find out what problems people are having and to follow some of the top sites in the niche to see what is "buzzing" in the niche.

This is especially important in niches where you are still learning or are entering as a newbie to the niche. If you stick with a niche you have interest or prior knowledge in then the ideas can flow even easier.

Truth be told, every niche connects to at least a few other niches at some level or another. I am expert, and continually learning more in my expert niche, but I also continue to learn more in the niches most closely related to mine - that way I can go off topic just a hair so I have more to write about more often and keep the info varied just enough to draw interest.

Wanna know more truth? When I get blocked for an idea, I smoke a fattie and take the dog for a walk and let my mind just run off through the daisies all on it's own. It usually comes back loaded with fresh ideas. Serious. Maybe not socially commendable, but hey, it works for me.

I find (and create) content strictly based on my wealth of information that i know about internet marketing. The more you know about your niche... the easier it will be to write articles from scratch everyday.

It's time to go another direction. Shut off your computer, get in your car, and go shopping.

Go to your favorite book store for an hour or two and browse titles, read dust covers, and have fun. Stop over at the magazine rack and rummage around.

Walk out into the mall and start wandering through stores looking at items which might have anything remotely to do with your niche. Hold them in your hands, turn them over, feel them.

Go to the food court, pull out your pen and paper, tablet PC, or smart phone and start making notes. While you are sitting there sit back and watch the people walking by. Start wondering what motivates them, what they want to buy, how they could use your product, what they want to learn. Keep making notes.

Repeat this process once a month.....

1.) Read other blogs
2.) Visit forums and see what people are asking
3.) Read news and write how it pertains to your industry
4.) Expound on other bloggers thoughts
5.) Purchase PLR and rewrite
6.) Visit PopURLS.com and view what's popular to write about
7.) Get content ideas from AllTop.com
8.) See what's hot on Alexa.com
9.) Write about your daily life
10.) Ask others what they need help with

I would make sure to stay connected as much as possible through the newspaper, tv, internet, etc. Find a story or something that captures your intrest and write about it! If this does not work then usually physical exercise clears my mind and I can come up with new ideas.

I ask my readers what they want to know about and go from there SurveyMonkey is my friend!

Also, I'm pretty active in the small business community locally. I attend a ton of networking events, meetups, etc, and just talk to people. Inevitably, they ask what I do, and I always get questions...I turn those into FAQs, and then the FAQs into full blown articles.

And, I read...a LOT. The more I read, the more ideas I get.

It's also smart to browse trending topics on Yahoo, Google, Bing, and Twitter to see what people are talking about now. That way, when you write, it'll be timely and wanted. You can also set up Google alerts for keywords in your niche. You'll get articles delivered to you daily about your area of expertise and use that to comment or write your own view on the topic.

Most importantly, I save notes on my phone, or in a little wire notebook so I don't forget ideas. Right now, I have over 10 pages of ideas...just ideas...over various topics. When I get writers block, I start there.



Good luck!

RSS feeds used to work good for me. Now I use my passions and topics of large scale interest.