“Content is King”, as they say.

So, in this blog post, I’m going to share how to create quality content to attract your ideal clients online. Sharing quality content is a great way to build your authority in your industry, and also to attract clients.

Today I’ll be talking more about how exactly to do that.  I know it can be difficult to come up with quality content, so I’ll share 5 ways you can get inspiration to create great content, so you’ll never be stuck for content ideas again.

Let’s start with the 3 types of content you need to create for your audience. The 3 types of content you should be sharing are 1) Educational 2) Engaging 3) Content that provides social proof.

Educational Content 

Let’s start with educational content; sharing educational content allows you to not only help your audience with something, or enlighten them about something, but it also helps to demonstrate your authority in your industry. It shows your audience that you are knowledgeable in your industry, and helps build trust.

Engaging Content

Engaging content should be thoughtful or engaging content that encourages your audience to comment and interact with you. This type of content helps to get people to know you better, and hopefully like you a bit more too.

Social Proof

And finally, providing social proof as part of your content strategy helps to build massive trust in you, your skills, and in whatever you’re offering as well. These types of content are what should make up 80% of the content that you share with your audience. The remaining 20% like I said can be branded or money-making content…just straight sales content, or a call to action to make a purchase or get on a call with you, or anything like that. And of course, it doesn’t have to be either or; you can absolutely share educational, engaging content, or social proof, with a call to action at the end to buy your offer. That would still count as 80/20 really. But this was just to show you how to mostly follow that 80/20 rule, in the most effective way possible. Of course, you should still share what feels right to you, and in the way that feels right to you.

Now, I know what some of you are probably thinking…easier said than done. I know a lot of people struggle with content ideas…it’s a common, and stressful, issue in online marketing, and one that I admittedly struggle with too sometimes. So today I’m also going to share with you 5 ways you can *always* find quality content to share with your audience.

1) YouTube

Some of you may have heard me talk about YouTube before. So if you haven’t figured out by now, I love YouTube. YouTube is the second largest search engine online, after Google. That is massively powerful. One way you can tap into that power is by looking for what the most common search topics are in your industry, and create content around those. There are different ways you can do this.

First, you can go to the YouTube search bar and type in a common industry word or phrase, and see what pops up. What will show in the dropdown list will be related searches that people have made around that word or phrase. So, for example, if I type in “marketing” in the YouTube search bar, I find “marketing strategies”, “marketing strategies for small business”, “marketing mix”, “marketing plan”, and a bunch more terms. Now, if you’re into marketing, then these are all topics you can use to base your content around, since you know these are terms that people have been actively searching for.

Another way you can look for people’s search terms is by using a Chrome plug-in called TubeBuddy. It allows you to look for search terms in a similar way, but it actually shows you things like most recent search terms, and just how popular each search term is. So, you can know which terms will actually get you the most hits (if you’re creating content for your YouTube channel, for instance). So, I gave you the example of “marketing”, but I hope you can see how you can do the same thing for keywords and phrases in *your* chosen industry as well.

Another way you can find quality content ideas on YouTube, is by researching what the thought leaders in your industry are talking about on *their* channels. You can search for popular thought leaders or popular influencers in your industry, and check out their most recent or most popular videos. You can bet that *they* have already done the keyword research before creating their own videos, so the content they are covering is popular and also heavily searched. So, you can just write down the topics of their most popular or most recent videos, and create your own content around those topics.

Now, important thing to note here, is that I’m NOT saying you should copy their content. At no point in this video will I be saying you should copy someone else. I’m just giving you tips on how to find quality content *topics* that you can talk about for your own audience. You can take the same topic, but give it your own spin, share your own tips or even your opinions on it, or expand on it for your own audience.

2) Books

I love books, and I love reading. And if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably got a bunch of books in your house related to your industry, either actual books, Kindle books, audiobooks…you get my point. Most business owners, as you also should, like to continue learning, and one great way to do this of course is through books. So, if you’re ever struggling for content, try flipping through any industry books you have lying around, and see what topics jump out at you that you could talk about with your audience. Chances are, you could generate multiple topic ideas from just one book.

For example, you could create one Facebook Live or YouTube video based on the main topics from each chapter of the book. That’s tons of content! Not only can you create videos on these topics, but you can also break up your videos to create blog posts, written posts, tweets, and so on.

3) Facebook Groups

A great way to generate content ideas is by searching through other Facebook groups. Join large Facebook groups in your industry, and see what the common topics are in those Facebook groups. You can also search the group for “how to” statements, to see what topics people often need help with, and create content around that. See what

What type of things people are needing help with. Find the posts that got a lot of engagement, and create content around those topics for your own audience. Some groups even use hashtags to organize their posts, or organize their content by “Popular topics in posts” (you would see it on the right-hand side of the group), so if you click on any of those, it will pull up a list of related posts on popular topics, and you can leverage those topic ideas to create content for your own audience.

4) Reddit/Quora

Now, I thought forums like Reddit or Quora were pretty much dead, now that we have so many social media outlets available to us. But, I was wrong! Forums are still very much alive, and the best part about forums is that a lot of the content is in the form of questions. So, if you join a forum related to your industry, you get to see all the different types of questions that people in your industry have been asking, and things that they struggle with.

This can be very useful for you when trying to create content. You can pick 4 questions that seem to be commonly asked questions, and turn that into a whole month’s worth of content- you can cover one topic per week, and make a video or do a Live on the topic, and then leverage that 1 video to create blogs, posts, tweets, and other types of content for the rest of each week. One month’s worth of content, done!

5) Thought Leaders

This is a really great way to generate topic ideas for your own content. Thought leaders, or influencers, are aaaalways creating content for their own platforms. Not only that, but they have entire teams helping them with their market research and social media, so they’ve already done the heavy lifting for you. Meaning, you already know that whatever they are creating content about is a topic that is popular, and likely to get them a lot of views and engagement. So, why not leverage the same topics to create content for your own audience?

Now, again, I’m not saying to copy, you absolutely do NOT want to do that. But you can totally talk about the same topic and share your own thoughts, ideas, or opinions on that topic. Great places to follow thought leaders or influencers are in their own Facebook groups, if they have one, on IG, and YouTube. If you are in their Facebook group, that is likely the best, because they probably share most of their best content with their intimate audience. You can search their name in their group and filter the search by “Most recent” to see what content they’ve been sharing most recently, find the posts that got the most engagement, and use those topics for your own content.

So, that’s it… 3 types of quality content you can use to attract your ideal clients, and 5 ways you can always find quality content ideas to share with your audience. 

If you would like even more social media content ideas, or even more strategies to help you attract leads & clients online, I’ve written an entire e-book that will help you do just that!

It’s called DIY Digital Marketing Secrets and you can grab your FREE copy right here!