Yesterday I woke up and knew I should publish a fresh blog post, but didn’t really have anything in mind…

Does that ever happen to you??

A good starting point for creating content is always keyword research, but there are other sources for great content ideas as well.

I decided to pop into Gmail and knock out that task first real quick. Right there in my Inbox was an email from someone with a great question. He wanted to know how to use social media. This was the first link in a chain of events, and I’ll share with you how that unfolded in detail for easy content development ideas…

Email is a Great Source For Content Ideas

If you get questions by email, or even on Twitter & Facebook, these are one of your best sources for content ideas. While you’ll always want to respond publicly when someone addresses you via Social Media, you’re limited on space.

You can easily expand on that in a detailed blog post and then come back and add that as an addition to your original (short) answer.

But email is a different story. Here you are only communicating with ONE person. And once that email is sent, the reply you wrote (content!) is gone forever.

UNLESS you repurpose it into a great blog post.

Often I will write my response as a blog post, and then reply with the link and a “thank you” for the topic & inspiration. (Note: I never use their full name or personal details in my post without permission)

The Chain of Events Begins…

As I said, yesterday I was browsing through Gmail and I had an email from Shawn about how to use social media. <- You can see the actual question at that link. You'll also see that I replied to that question with a 1,359 word blog post.

Never write to one person when you can write to the whole world.

Would it be a waste to send a 1,359 word reply to ONE person by email? Yes. Especially if you know that other people in your market are interested in that same information. You certainly wouldn’t want to reply individually to each person that asked you a similar question.

Instead, you can point each new person that asks to the ONE blog post.

One Thought Leads To Another

It took me about 90 minutes to write that post, which reminded me of a recent question I was asked over lunch. Since I was thinking it, I saved my Draft and hopped over to share that thought & question on my Facebook page:

This created “content” that got a nice response – 9 likes and 19 comments (so far). And yes, every social media update is “content”. Google considers anything that resides on it’s own URL to be “a page”.

So a single update like this is a page in the eyes of Google. And this particular “page” is full of relevant user-generated content – that of course links back to my profile which links back to my site…

From Blog Content to Social Media Content

Once I published the blog post, I shared the link on both Facebook and Twitter. Here you can see a number of people shared & retweeted my post:

You’ll notice in MY tweet that I invited them to add ideas & resources of their own to the post. This was to encourage comments, of course.

I later shared the link to that post as a resource on Social Media during the #indiebizchat Twitter Chat. I was asked how Affiliates could effectively use Social Media (and if they should), and the link was shared and retweeted again during and after that live chat as well.

One Post Leads To Another!

To put a little icing on the content cake, I created a second blog post detailing out how and why I wrote that one.

You’re reading it right now.

I thought you might enjoy an inside peek at how I come up with content on the fly, and the chain of events that takes it from idea to publishing to sharing…

Best,

p.s. Like these tips? Sign up at Easy Unique Content for more!