“Where do you get your ideas?”

“What should I write about?”

These are some of the most common questions I receive from the small business owners I’ve worked with over the years.

The importance of content can’t be understated – it’s a vital piece of the digital marketing puzzle.

It’s a way for you to communicate your expertise & experience and provides a bridge – or path – for your customers/clients to find you online.

So having a deep, organized pool of topics helps you continuously build those important bridges to your small business through those digital marketing channels.

Last week I mentioned creating exact descriptions of your best (ideal) clients.

While this will help you in many ways, perhaps one of the most important ways it helps you is by creating a starting point – or reference point – for generating topics for your content.

This might be obvious for most small business owners, but for many that are having a hard time generating topics, this is the reference point you can always reach back to when you’re ideas are coming up blank.

Think back to the conversations you’ve had with your best customers – put yourself in their shoes and review your content – what topics would you want covered that would be important to them in the context of your industry, products, services or company?

While there’s an unlimited amount of data you can use online to get ideas from – I’ve found the very best ones come from clients.

Keep It Relevant

While there’s always room for creativity with your content topics, keeping them relevant is important to keeping things focused on the problems you solve — and what your small business does.

Straying too far away from your core industry, products and services may cause more noise than it needs to in some cases.

There’s an ocean of noise online, so keeping things on point & relevant can help your content find its way to folks that need it, and folks that need your products & services.

Make It Unique

On the topic of creativity, if you can find unique topics to discuss that are within that relevance boundary, it’s an additional way you can generate topics.

There’s an endless stream of content online across all industries – likely including yours, so if you can find topics that haven’t already been covered, it’s another way to add to your topic pool.

Add Depth

If you happen to be in an industry that already has large pool of content out in the wild, adding depth can be another way to generate ideas.

Perhaps there’s a different angle or dimension you can add depth with for existing topics, or perhaps there’s content out there that can be customized for your particular area or region.

Consistency Is Key (As Always)

Being consistent with taking the time to brainstorm topics is important for keeping up with your content creation processes.

When you’re getting ready to create content, having a pre-set list of topics to draw from saves time.

Instead of “shooting from the hip” for your content, you can deliberately plan out your content in advance, allowing the creation process to move more quickly.

While creating content may seem simple for many small business owners, for many others it can be a struggle to keep up with.

Having a deep, organized topic pool (or having someone to help you create that pool) to pull from can reduce that struggle and keep you focused on more important things for your small business.