Having spent most of the last few weeks hanging out at events and with various groups of aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners, both within the recruitment industry and in other sectors, one thing is clear. One of the first questions that come from the audience is, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’

Now, I’ve been coming up with ideas and seemingly pulling them out of the air for the best part of 10 years, so for me these days… the ideas just come! As a team, we listen to you talking about your business and, from there, recognise the hooks and the leaps that bring our creative content ideas to the forefront. I realise, however, that not everyone has the luxury of hanging out with us to get that moment of creativity, so if you’re currently a lone content wolf, here are the places that you can go to find content ideas that will make people shout about you:

Answerthepublic.com

I love this site! You can use it for free, you just input your keyword or keyphrase, and it supplies you with a wheel of options that you can develop into content ideas, blog titles, email subject lines, themes for a video… you can even create a podcast episode around the idea!

Word of warning, sometimes the suggestions need a grammatical tweak, so please don’t simply do a copy-paste. Make sure you make the suggestion your own!

AlsoAsked.com

Similar to Answer The Public, but it’s mapping questions out for you. To explain, you input your question (something a prospect might Google), and AlsoAsked shows you what that prospect might have also asked, then off of that question – what also may have been asked, and on and on!

Use it the same way you use Answer The Public. However, AlsoAsked can really help you if you’re looking to write a series of posts as part of an ongoing campaign. I’ve also seen people use it to help them structure long-form blogs or chapters in books they’re writing!

Contentideas.io

Simply, this is a content suggestion tool. You plug in a few themes, and it suggests all sorts of things to you based on the top-performing content it’s found online – you can choose to filter by platform to help surface the best ideas for you. Take a look around it and have a play!

Remember, these are posts that have already been created elsewhere – so use this as inspiration. Not a library that you can copy character for character! You always want to be personalising this stuff – take the article it’s suggested and write your own using your own opinion, and create an image that has your stamp on it with captions that fit your tone of voice.

Daysoftheyear.com

There is a day for everything, a month of awareness for all sorts of things! This site collates them all on a global level. You’ll never be short of an idea using this site!

Top tips are to look at it once a month for the next six weeks and plan in your diary the important days you want to make use of. Also, remember it can be very American, so do your research on the days you choose. You do NOT have to use all of the days suggested, and my opinion is that you should only do the ones that align with your brand, your culture or the individual values of people in your business.

Green Umbrella’s 75 Ideas Of things To Post!

Well, it would have been wrong of me to leave this out, wouldn’t it? Go grab your download, print it out and go through it with a highlighter. Simply highlight the ideas you know will work for you and your business. Once you’ve done this, you should have a crib sheet of 20-30 ideas you can keep cycling through.

There are a bunch of other resources you can use – but I think those 5 give you a solid starting point. Let me know how you get on!