Looking for Inspiration for Tired Content?
Sitting in front of an empty word document while the clock is ticking can be intimidating, deflating and demoralising – especially if content writing is what you are supposed to be doing for a living.
You can be sat staring at your screen for what feels like hours waiting for the right words to come to you; words that you can throw at a page, that string themselves into engaging, witty and coherent sentences and magically form into an interesting 500-word blogpost… Unfortunately, the ‘just sitting there and waiting for a revelation’ method does not usually come up trumps.
If you have found yourself stuck in a rut with your content, and are trying to find fresh inspiration to churn out some high-quality posts, fear not; we have put together a mini guide to give you back your copywriting mojo, and help you to go about developing some fresh, top notch content.
- Turn to social media and have a look what is trending. Scroll through your twitter and Facebook news feed. What people are posting about is what they want to read about. After writing about the same topic for 3 months straight, your well of ideas is bound to run dry. Find ways to incorporate current affairs or trends into what you are wanting to write about. If everybody is going wild over a new trend that is inescapable, jump on it and use it to your advantage. A perfect example of this – Pokémon Go. Remember your audience, referencing pop culture in your content could give it a much bigger chance of being noticed and generating shares across social media.
- When researching, keep an open mind and avoid searching for articles on the topic you are looking to write about. You aren’t looking to recycle something that people have already read 10 times, you want to produce something new. Approach your subject from a new angle, reading a post written on a completely different industry could offer some pretty sweet creative insights.
- Many weird and wonderful questions are asked on Q & A sites such as Quora and Yahoo Answers. Search your chosen topic, and while trawling through people’s musings, you can figure out a solution to the problem that somebody is presenting and hey presto, you have yourself a damn fine piece of content.
- Keep an eye on other’s jaw dropping content. Staying up to date with blogs that you personally enjoy is essential – how are you supposed to create your own quality posts if you don’t spend time checking blogs out yourself? Bookmark articles that grabbed your attention and read back over them, do they have any patterns or similarities between them? Discovering what captures your own interest can help you input those elements into your own work, after all, if you don’t want to read it, why would anybody else?
Keep an eye out for anything that stimulates you. It doesn’t have to be long chunks of text, if you find infographics, pictures and videos helpful; use them to beef up your content. Keep your options open to encounter inspiration any time, any place.