Many bloggers, myself included, struggle with coming up with new Content Ideas regularly. Although small business trends are always but, fresh content is as necessary now as it has always been for several reasons, including your search engine optimization (SEO). Staying active within your industry for both current and new readers is also a plus.

After pulling my hair out and banging my head into the monitor on multiple occasions I found a few helpful ways to streamline the content creation process. Some may be old to you and some may be new but nonetheless they work! In no particular order they are listed below.

Please keep in mind that these are general suggestions, some of these ideas may vary and need tweaking depending on your niche.

Easy Ways To Come Up With New Content

Local news and news in general – This is my favorite because the content is provided for you already, you can just add your own spin on it and summarize it. Google Alerts is an awesome way to make this an easy task.

Books and magazines

Must visit Web sites for the Creative Process

At the top of my list are:

Topsy – is a search engine that helps to find content real-time from twitter and google plus. They offer a free 14-day trial to see if you like it. Just browsing through the Topic helps to spark new ideas for me. These are the days that I really love pen and paper.

Pinterest – I spend time each day on Pinterest pinning and looking for content because I like how dynamic the topics are and you can literally find anything! I only recently learned to really appreciate how awesome it is for business and personal.

Quora – people can ask, answer, or edit questions on Quora which leaves plenty of room for content ideas to blossom. What conversations are happening in your industry or around your product? Find out and then answer those questions in blog post form.

Niches – I love dealing in niches and making sites around something specific to start but then branching out. Sometimes it is taking something as simple as one keyword, such as rug and seeing results that maybe you couldn’t think of on your own. You can use a keyword research tool for this task or go straight to Bing or Google and put in one of your main keywords and see what results come up and then broaden the scope from there. Sticking with the example of rug, it sounds boring and simple but there are so many posts you can generate such as sizing, cleaning, matching the colors to the décor and more. Think out of the box!

Even More Content ideas

When you’ve come up with all your new topics and you still feel stuck try the following:

Quotes – search for quotes that are relevant to your blog topic and create a post around it. Or compile a short list and that in of itself can become your post. There are several sites that cater to quotes with my favorite being QuoteGarden.com.

Interviews – scout someone in your industry and see if they would be willing to do an email interview. Publicity for you as well as them, it’s a win/win.

Repurpose old content and/or PLR – Come up with a post that you can refer back to old posts on the same subject but with a new twist. And lastly, PLR content can be a huge help when you want to keep your blog fresh and engaging but don’t have the time to think up new topics. There’s still work involved but I find it easier to pull apart, add to and take from a post than I do to create it some days.

This is a topic I can talk about for hours because it is one of my common struggles but this is a good start. What do you do when you are stuck and can’t come up with new ideas? Please share!