S.M.L.F. Series: Gathering Content Ideas

Yesterday, we opened our Social Media Love Fest (S.M.L.F.) Series with a discussion on how we can use social media to promote our blog articles. During this process, we establish a presence on the social media platforms where our target audience hangs out.

This step is crucial.

Don’t Assume or Guess

You don’t want to use your own favorite social media sites, or the ones where you think your people should hang out. Instead, do your research and find the places where the people you’re trying to reach are already hanging out at.

Interact with Your Audience

Then start interacting on those social pages and in those social circles and groups. Not only will this help you to build a platform that you can then use to promote your own content, you’re also getting to know your target audience better. Best of all, you can gather almost an endless amount of content ideas from your social media interactions.

Using the New Ideas

Some of the content ideas will come as you’re interacting and answering questions. Those are great opportunities for quick content ideas similar to the idea I shared a while back about taking email questions and turning them into blog articles. The same works here and you can either copy and paste the question and your answer, or even take a screenshot and then elaborate a bit in your article.

That technique alone is great, but don’t stop there. As I’m interacting on social media, I always keep either a notebook and pen close by or a document open to take notes. As I read through articles and discussions, a lot of ideas for future blog articles come up and I make a note of them. Start creating lists like this yourself and you’ll never run out of ideas for things to blog about.

Boss Up

If you want to take it a step further, start drafts for each of these blog article ideas and make a quick note of what you want to cover, or write up a rough outline for the article. Save it as a draft and it will be waiting for you in your blogging dashboard when you’re ready to flesh it out, pretty it up, and publish the article.

The more you interact with your target audience on social media, the better you get to know them and the better you can deliver what they want with your blogging content. That in turn, will result in larger email subscriber numbers, more visitors to your blog overall, and hopefully a larger income from your blog as well.

The Rundown

Don’t discount the information and research you can do on social media sites. It’s a treasure trove of information and content ideas.