Business and blogging go hand in hand, like Britain and rain, teacups and saucers or Kanye West and Kanye West.

When asking the question; “Why should my business have a blog?” the answers are:

  • It generates more traffic to your company website
  • It builds a relationship with consumers and results in return visits and recommendations
  • It is a great way to interact with your customers
  • It makes your website more authoritative and helps to improve SEO rankings
  • It gives you publicity through word of mouth and search results

Part of the struggle of maintaining an active and relevant company blog is finding things to write about. It can be all too easy to suffer a mind-blank in the quest for thinking up new and engaging content to write for your readers, which is where the internet will come to your rescue.

In this post, we’ll share some of our favourite websites for finding and sourcing content, and how to get the most out of them. Feel free to scroll down to the site you wish to know more about:

  1. Reddit
  2. Feedly
  3. Emails
  4. Google
  5. Google+
  6. Quora

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Reddit is one of the top 30 websites in the world, receiving more than 11 million average daily visitors. Because of the huge popularity of reddit, it’s sheer size, and the often anonymous format, it can be a great place to find ideas on very specific niche’s, from a large number of people, including the likes of Obama, Bill Gates and numerous others in the public eye.

How can you use it for sourcing blog ideas?

Subreddits

Reddit is comprised of thousands of smaller subreddits, all tailored towards a specific topic. Some of them are very general, such as /r/Funny or /r/AskReddit, whilst others can be appealing to even the smallest minority – there’s probably a entirely dedicated subreddit to your phone, or the car you drive.

Finding subreddits that work for you is the first thing you should do, when using reddit as your content sourcing platform.

 

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Search

The search feature in reddit isn’t the most advanced, but can certainly steer you in the right direction if you’re looking for a specific topic.

 

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When you search reddit, you have the option to choose to search the subreddit you’re in (I.e Marketing) or for the whole site. In the search results, you will see suggestions of subreddits you can join that are similar to, or talk about, your search term, or an aggregate of links containing something similar to your search term.

In this example, we searched for “blog hosting platform”, and were suggested to look at various subreddits, including Web Development and Web Hosting, as well as being presented with a list of threads that discuss blog hosting platforms. Clicking on the comments of these links can lead you to some great content ideas, from experts and laymen alike.

 

Monitoring

Monitoring a specific subreddit for a prolonged period of time to help you get a grip of what users in that community want, or are asking. If you hover around a subreddit about fishing, for instance, for long enough, you will see certain questions and posts popping up again and again.

Redditors are generally internet savvy, so it is probable that they have already checked on google for their query before posting on reddit, meaning that for the questions they’re asking, there’s a good chance are not easily found.

Site searches

By googling a site name, followed by reddit (I.e BBC News Reddit), you can find a page that shows a list of all the times the bbc news domain has appeared on reddit. This can be great for gaging opinions about competitors articles, your own brand/website, or simply filtering our reddit via a domain of your choice:

 

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Feedly is one of the most simplistic ways of content and ideas sourcing on this list. It was the main RSS reader that people flocked to, following the death of Google Reader a few years ago. To put simply, it is a list of articles from websites you’ve selected.

Instead of having to check all the websites you find useful, you can have them compile in one list, or RSS feed.

 

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When it comes to adding sites to your feeds, it is a simple as either pasting in a URL that you want to get the RSS feed of, or searching for a general term, and have Feedly suggest sites you might want to add to your different feeds.

 

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Email is a channel that can often be forgotten, when looking for ideas of what to write about on your blog, however some of the best ideas can come from mailing lists, other company newsletters or correspondence from co-workers.

 

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Of course, you don’t have to wait until the perfect email drops into your inbox so that you can flag it and act on it later. Subscribe to relevant mailing lists from the sites you regularly read, so that all the information you could need gets handily dropped into your inbox every week.

Keep an eye out for sign up pages and email alerts from sites in your industry. Don’t be afraid of clogging up your inbox with junk, since you can always add them to handy folders, or unsubscribe if they are not relevant.

 

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The two most common ways of using Google for content sourcing are already very well know, but it would be injust to leave them out of this list because of that, since google is such a useful tool in finding ideas for content.

The first way, one that we’re sure we won’t have to explain, is to simply google topics that you’re interested in writing about, and take inspiration from the sites that google returns. This can be useful when you’re new to a certain topic, and want to get to grips with what sites are relevant for that area, what topics are being covered, and what sort of headings rank well.

The other way is to use Google predictive search. This involves starting a search query and seeing what Google suggests. The reason this is so effective is because a) it is offering ideas that you yourself might not have thought of, or be searching for, and b) if you write a post that answers one of the questions proposed in the suggested search box, then you can tailor your article heading to really target the search term, that you now know.

 

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Making use of Google alerts and trends is another great way to stay on top of the news for the day, or look at how searches and phrases have developed over time. One of our best ways to stay on top of what’s trending is to subscribe to the google trends newsletter, to receive emails when certain items are trending on Google. You can also do the same with pre-determined words or phrases, such as brand terms or your area of expertise.

 

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Twitter is a fast moving social media platform, where admittedly a large proportion of content will pass you by. Unlike Facebook, it is quite common to be following thousands upon thousands of people, and with your twitter feed refreshing every couple of seconds, it can be difficult – no, near-enough impossible – to read every tweet.

Trending topics

Trending topics can be a great indication of not only what is going on in Twitter, but what the general public are interested, in the area of your choice, be it the UK, your town or the world.

Keeping an eye out for trending topics and clicking through to see what people are saying can be a good resource when finding things to write about.

 

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Searches

Instead of waiting for something relevant or interesting to show up on the trending topics, you can conduct searches in Twitter, and monitor the results of those searches (Tweets from other users) in real time. This can be useful to see how people feel about certain topics, how many people are talking about things, and for gathering ideas from other users or articles being tweeted.

 

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Lists

Lists are a great way of organising your Twitter stream, so it isn’t a jumbled mess of 140 character tidbits of information. Adding certain people to different lists means you can select to only view said list, and organise what type of content you’re seeing based on your intention.

For example: Adding us to an ‘SME’ list, to see tips for SMEs.

 

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Google+ is often put under scrutiny and questioned on its abilities to hold its own as a reputable social network, amidst the dominating regulars such as Facebook and Twitter, but one think it does very well is make it easy to follow, or ‘circle’ large groups of people and influencers in one go, and offer communities for like-minded people to get together.

Circling people

Google Plus suggests groups of people that you might be interested in circling, to show up on your news feed. This way, it is very easy to organise and categorise the sort of content you want to see. The addition of the ‘follow all’ button makes for a very effective way of setting everything up, incredibly quickly.

 

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Communities

Communities on Google Plus can be a great place to content, share content with, and discover great content from, other people. Communities are usually based around a specific topic, whether it’s ‘cars’, ‘digital marketing’ or ‘ tech news’, and are populated by people interested in that topic.

Using these communities as a place for sourcing ideas and content is ideal, since it is easy to segregate what you’re looking for, get instant feedback on certain topics or articles, and interact with people to discover more into areas you’re interested in.

 

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Quora is a question and answer based website, which is incredibly useful when it comes to gathering ideas for your next blog post or social media campaign, or for getting much more detailed answers to your pre-thought ideas. Flicking through your feed, or searching for broad topics, will show up a vast of amount of questions, which can all inspire you in one way or another.

If you already have a topic in mind, searching broadly for something, i.e “Marketing”, you will see pages and pages of questions people have already asked, around this topic. The good thing about Quora is that instead of just getting a standalone idea for a post, you also get answers from people, which helps when it comes to thinking of the content you are going to use in the post.

 

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