Growing Your Crop: Finding Content for your Website

where to get content for my website

So your site is perfectly set up, but there’s nothing on it. You’ve probably just Googled something like where to get content for my website, but you have limited time and no idea where to look. What’s next?

Do you just get typing and “write what you know”?

Do you find the most popular articles online and just write about the same topics?

Or do you ignore that blinking cursor for a minute and craft a plan?

I’m going to guess that you’re here because you want a successful website, not just one with a lot of content on it. If so, some careful preparation and learning how the most successful websites grow their traffic will make both of these things a reality. This will take a little patience, but it will pay off.

Do you want to learn where to find the highest trending content online and how you can use it to maximize clickthrough rates? Or how to break through the noise so that visitors actually want to read your posts once they’ve clicked?

Then read on!

Here are 7 excellent ways to find quality content for your site.

1. Where To Get Content For My Website: Do Competitor Research The Right Way

Some great ways to check on your competition include:

  • Using tools like Buzzsumo to find the highest trending content and track how well it’s performed on social media
  • Using Google Analytics and Google Search Console to find the top results for keywords in your niche
  • Using Google Alerts to get an email roundup of topic mentions online
  • Using SpyOnWeb to check for any site’s page ranking (including Alexa rank)
  • Looking at the sites and social media accounts of your competitors (tools like TweetReach can help with in-depth analysis if you want this)

Before you dive in, though, there are two things to keep in mind.

First, don’t just look at sites of the top businesses in your field. They’re great for identifying website best practices (e.g. for UX and UI Design), but they’re likely to have huge marketing budgets and established reputations and can afford to take risks you can’t (yet).

Instead, look at a range of competition at different levels of success, including those that are just above where you are.

Second, there’s a fine line between being riding the peak of the trending topic wave and just being another person following the crowd.

Write about those top trends, but also look for the up-and-coming subjects that will get you traffic that slowly increases.

2. Use Instagram And Pinterest For Useful Infographics

Instagram and Pinterest won’t just help you to create content, but to share it as well.

A quick search for your chosen subject will give you useful infographics that can inspire new content ideas at a glance.

You can also check out their popular posts feed to see what’s trending.

Other bloggers and business owners use Pinterest to drive traffic back to their sites. Once you have quality content to post, you can do the same!

3. Use Reddit And Quora To Find FAQs

Reddit calls itself the front page of the Internet for a reason: no matter how niche your site is, there’ll be a subreddit for it. Some popular ones include:

You get the idea.

Take a look at the questions people are asking over and over about your field and write posts to respond to them.

You can even go back in later and reply with a link to your post (as long as you’re careful to write a genuinely helpful response so that you don’t come across as spamming).

4. Newsletters

Get ideas for new content and shareable content from newsletters that provide you with a run-down of the top stories trending that week (or day).

Which ones will be useful to you obviously depends on what your business is, but some of the top newsletters include:

  • The Daily Digg – from the makers of digg.com, this newsletter reports on yesterday’s top stories and often picks up on content that goes viral
  • Next Draft – a round-up of top ten news stories from around the web, including current events as well as more quirky and unusual trending content
  • Zen Habits – the newsletter of Leo Babuta’s popular site zenhabits.com gives some useful insights into trending wellness topics
  • Smart Brief – sign up to receive email summaries of top stories from over 150 different industries

Use these to inspire your own content creation and consider how you could produce something on trend but even better.

5. User Generated Content

If your product is somewhat established but your site needs to catch up, incorporating some UGC is an excellent way to build trust online.

On average, UGC can lead to visitors spending almost double the amount of time on your site and can include selfies, personal stories, and anything else people like sharing online.

A great example is Tourism Australia, who used customers’ travel photos as a way to attract more customers and increased time spent on their site by 66%.

Not sure where to start? Reach out to any existing customers and offer incentives (discounts, freebies, etc.) for content, then take it from there.

6. Customer Comments

Customer comments on blogs, product reviews and businesses’ social media pages (your own or others) are great places to find gaps that your competitors have yet to fill.

What are people complaining about or finding difficult to use about your competitors’ products or services?

If your competitor has written a killer article that’s been shared many times, scroll down to the comments. What questions are not answered?

Use this knowledge to your advantage and offer something better.

7. Events In Your Niche

If you’re running dry of ideas, events are a great place to find inspiration and you don’t even need to be there (though if you are, this opens up even more options).

If you’re going to be showcasing your product at an event, this is a goldmine for creating shareable content. For example:

  • Draw in the crowds by creating an Instagram backdrop and hashtag that your customers can use to create UGC
  • Network and make connections – there may be someone you can interview for your site or do a joint post with
  • Don’t just think about writing – take videos and photos that you could share on social media or make into an Instagram or Facebook story

List-based articles are preferred by around a third of all internet users, so writing a “New Trends From X Event” article is an easy way to make something that captures a trend just before it explodes. A few example headlines from a quick Google include:

  • 7 Top Trends From The New York Fall 2019 Runways
  • Adobe Summit 2019: The Main Trends In Analytics And Marketing For 2019 And 2020

You could even do a round-up of events, such as “The Ultimate List Of Digital Marketing Events To Attend In 2019”.

Go Create!

Now that your burning question of where to get content for my website has been answered, it’s time to take action. Research your competitors and listen to what their customers (i.e. your potential customers) are saying they want. Incentivize UGC to create a trusted online presence and use the tools I’ve mentioned so that you never miss the boat on what’s trending.

So, what now? It’s time to put your site out there by generating leads and quality backlinks.

See how you can climb the ranks online with these SEO lead generating strategies and get your content seen by the right people!