Are you a content strategist who struggles regularly with coming up with quality content ideas? Generating content ideas is by no means a part-time role and when content marketing is planned to be used as a performance marketing tactic, you can not possibly do without automation. While human involvement can not be eliminated, automation for content ideation goes a long way sustaining the throughput of content required for content marketing to be truly effective.
In this post we discuss 9 content ideation tools that help you create top-quality content at scale.
Why automation helps in content ideation-Common sense answers but still worth recapping
There are various reasons why one should use automated tools for blog content ideas generation
- Saves Time-The biggest benefit by far, according to marketers, is saving time. This indeed increases productivity because writers can now focus on research and writing instead of spending inordinate amounts of time just thinking about writing.
- Reduce Costs-Content ideation takes time. Whether you do it yourself or get professional help, it still needs time to plan the flow, match it to your offerings portfolio, do keyword research, etc.
- Scale-API based content suggestion tools, news aggregators, feed readers, etc. are all designed to provide keyword-based content suggestions at scale. This can save a tonne of time that you would otherwise spend just scouring the web for content ideas.
- Follow the trend-Tools like BuzzSumo, Twitter trends, etc. let you know the hot topics which may drive enormous traffic to your blog.
- Automated checks for correct keywords-For example, tools such as Ubersuggest, Google keyword planner, and our very own content audit tool can provide alerts on which search queries have been getting impressions and click lately.
9 tools that help you generate blog post ideas at scale
1. Alltop
Alltop is a fantastic tool that helps you know what top blogs in your industry are writing and gives you content creation ideas. Co-founded by Guy Kawaski, Alltop covers a varied range of topics to help you out in all ways possible. You can adopt this quick way of checking out content on top blogs on the web and get inspired by those ideas to write your high-quality content.
2. Hubspot’s blog topic generator
Are you done with blog post topics? Well, here’s Hubspot’s blog topic generator to your rescue! It gives you blog post ideas so that you produce fresh, enticing, and clickable content in your desired niche. You just have to enter a topic or a word, and the blog topic generator shall provide you with ideas to write about. For example, I fed ‘Content Marketing’ as the keyword, and its output was the following topics:
Content Marketing: Expectation vs reality
Will content marketing ever rule the world?
The next big thing in content marketing
Content marketing explained in fewer than 150 characters
This week’s top stories about content marketing
Aren’t these likable suggestions?
Here you can see the interface is really simple and easy to use. It isn’t complex or ostentatious, which makes it my best choice when I need some quick and smart ideas.
3. Portent’s Content Idea Generator
This tool helps you work quicker, smarter, and nimbly than others. This tool helps you come up with pretty good ideas for your blog post topic. It helps you populate your blog with killer content. You can come up with cool and catchy titles using this tool. You must most certainly use this, especially if you are looking for a dash of humor in your content. Some suggestions may sound silly but if you research further, you are sure to get good content out of it.
4. BuzzSumo
This tool shows you what’s trending in the contemporary world. You just have to enter a topic or URL in the search box, and BuzzSumo shall do the later part for you. It searches the web for all the trending information related to your topic and fetches the same for you. BuzzSumo is a super useful tool to flesh out amazing knowledge related to your niche so that you can have a broader look at the content you are willing to write!
Not just that, it also tells you the number of shares and social engagements content receives, identifies key sharers, displays backlinks besides showing you top trending content! Through this information, you can quickly tell what resonates the most with your readers and can produce the best quality content henceforth.
5. Content Row’s Link Bait Title Generator
Clickable headlines and engaging content is what we all look up to, to grab all those eyeballs and Linkbait title generator helps us do the former part. You just have to input a word, and the title generator shall provide you with five titles free of cost. For more title suggestions you may have to opt for a paid version. You also have to make sure that the content matches up with the clickbaity title else the bounce rate may go up in your website which is what you absolutely don’t want. Hence, once you select the title, churn up some good content, and you are ready to post!
6. Twitter trending topics
This tool allows you to easily browse through Twitter and still get blog post ideas simultaneously. Isn’t that amazing! The ‘what’s happening’ section on the right-hand side of the home page tells you about trending topics and the latest news from which you can get a cue for your content. Also, you may embed tweets to your fully tailored blog post from here.
7. Scoop.it
Scoop.it lets you research and publish the best content on your blog. This tool is for curators, business intelligence professionals, and marketers who want to churn out classic content. When you enter a particular topic, Scoop.it fetches the content that industry experts are talking about. You can add your own opinions and insight into it to make the content lucid and knowledgeable. Once done, you can then share the post across other platforms.
8. Ubersuggest.org
This tool helps you come up with a handful of blog post ideas. You can even get more ideas if you opt for the paid version.
For example, it gives 462 other keyword ideas when I enter “content marketing” in the search box. Besides this, it also gives you content ideas on which you can write your enticing blog post as it lists down the popular page titles! You can also get information related to backlinks and social shares. All in all, I would like to say that there’s a lot to explore when it comes to this tool and you must give it a try for sure.
You might have heard about this tool. It helps you know the search volume for different keywords and phrases which you might be considering for your blog post. Besides, it also tells you about
- Related topics
- Related search queries
- Whether a topic is trending up or down
Google Trends is a famous tool, and you should start to use it if you haven’t used it till now!
The next innovation-Using your own search performance data for content ideation
Most content ideation tools in the market today provide suggestions based on the relevance of a content item to a certain keyword. You type in a keyword and the tool scans its database to find matching content items based on that keyword.
But what if you could get content ideas based on your own search engine performance results? Most experienced SEOs probably already do this albeit manually. Here are the steps they usually take
- Log in to the Web Search Console account and check out the various search queries
- Sort them by impressions/clicks/ctr etc.
- For each topic in your portfolio, do some kind of a regex match (or excel macro) that filters out queries that closely relate to your topic(s)
- Add these keywords/queries manually to your keyword consideration set
For sites that have already been around for a while, this technique works really well. Instead of trying to figure out ideas based on what people search for in general, you can now get ideas based on specifically how your content shows up in response to specific search queries.
What if you could set up custom rules to automatically alert you about search queries that match certain volume/engagement criteria? For example, the Syptus content audit platform can alert you on keywords that match a certain impression volume/average rank ratio (one of the few metrics we support).
For large accounts, this level of automation can go a long way in identifying content ideas based on your own search data.
Conclusion
Effective content ideation involves having a defined process/approach combined with the right tools. In one of our earlier posts, we outlined a framework for generating content ideas. That was the process part. The tools outlined above can be used to effectively complement the process and come up with quality content ideas at scale. With these two in place, the next step is to follow qualitative methods to create high-quality content.
