Check Question Sites
Another way to get great ideas is to check out question sites online to find out what people want to know about in your niche. Here are the sites you can browse:
- Yahoo! Answers
- Quora.com
- JustAnswer.com
Yahoo! Answers and Quora are community sites, which means anyone can answer the questions. As such, these two sites give you the bonus information of whether a particular topic is popular right now. Generally, the more people who answer a question, the greater interest there is in the topic.
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SlideShare
If you go to SlideShare.net, you can search for popular slide-share decks in your niche. Again, this will give you ideas of what’s popular, as well as ideas for different ways to present information.
Interview People
Here’s a bit of a sneaky way to generate ideas: interview experts in your niche. This is an alternative to hiring a consultant, and it comes with the big benefit that you’ll have a webinar and/or the recordings that you can use as a lead magnet or product, if you so choose.
For best results, interview a variety of people in the niche. For example, let’s suppose you’re gathering ideas for a weight loss product. You can interview a variety of people such as:
- A dietician.
- A personal trainer.
- A medical professional.
- Someone who has lost a lot of weight.
- Someone who creates and sells low-fat cookbooks.
- A bodybuilder (who knows a lot about “cutting”).
- The person who leads your local Weight Watchers or similar weight-loss meetings.
And similar. If you interview several people, then you’ll get several perspectives – and this will help you generate plenty of good ideas.
Check Your Traffic Logs
Take a peek at your traffic logs and answering the following three questions:
- How are people reaching your site? That’s right, the way that people arrive at your site may give you ideas. For example, if your site “accidentally” ranks for a niche keyword and people are coming in from the search engines based on that keyword, that may give you ideas about what sort of content and products to create.
- What content is most popular on your site? On what pages do people tend to spend a lot of time? If you look at this data along with other clues (such as what people are commenting on), you’ll get a sense of what your prospects want. In turn, you can brainstorm ideas for new content and products.
- How do people navigate through the site? This may give you some insight into your audience’s thought process, which in turn may spark some content or product ideas for you.
Let’s suppose you have a dog training site. If people typically navigate from articles about chewing to articles about jumping to articles about counter-surfing, that tells you that your audience needs help with problem behaviors. You might then create a product just addressing these problem behaviors.
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Consider Controversies
Here’s a question for you to ponder: what is controversial in your niche? If you can figure out what’s controversial, then you can generate ideas for content, products, ad campaigns and similar.
For example, let’s suppose you’re in a weight-loss market, and a new diet supplement hits the market that’s very controversial. You can create content around this supplement, lead magnets, ads and even products. While this is a short-lived strategy (as controversial topics aren’t necessarily evergreen), this is a way to generate ideas on hot topics.
Here’s how to find these controversial topics:
- Check popular blogs in your niche for topics that are polarizing those who comment.
- Read forums and groups to see what topics are generating a lot of controversy.
- Browse social media to see what has people in your niche up in arms.
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Run Tests
Here’s a great way to generate ideas: run some tests and experiments in your niche.
For example, let’s suppose you cater to those who want to learn about copywriting. You might sit down and brainstorm about “conventional wisdom” in your niche (such as how headlines should be in quotes, or even sales letter should include a postscript). You can then run tests on the conventional wisdom, which in turn may generate ideas. For instance, you may create a lead magnet that’s all about challenging conventional wisdom. Or you may even get an entirely different idea, such as an idea for improving the split-testing tools that are currently available.
Keep Reading: How To Use Idea Generators
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