I often suggest that you keep writing content for your website. Mainly because that works and – as long as people keep reading things – it will continue to work.

But after a while, your creativity can dry up. You run out of ideas or think that you’ve said everything you can say on the subject. Which, unless you’ve written a book the size of an encyclopedia is highly unlikely.

So how can you find out what your customers want to know but you haven’t told them yet?

One such email spurred the creation of this page. I got asked “What is the best way to find out what specifically your customer really wants, or would want, to see?”

If you get emails from your customers then those often provide clues or even outright questions like the one above.

You can then answer the specific question.

What I tend to do is write an email back and then either copy the reply (with any personal details removed) to my email list.

I’ll often also expand on the answer in a post like this one.

The reason for doing this is that a question asked by one person is usually running through the mind of lots of other people but they don’t quite get round to asking. It just runs around their head for a while and then gets put in the area of your mind that holds unanswered questions, either never to appear again or to fester away until you do something about it.

Much like the question I was asked the other day about the Voyager space probe that’s left out solar system – nothing to do with internet marketing but a question that couldn’t stay unanswered in my mind. The question was how it was powered and the answer is it’s got 3 small radioactive generators that are gradually getting weaker.

Not the kind of question many of your customers will have.

But they will have questions!

Sometimes they’ll come straight out and ask you – that’s fantastic news.

Other times, it seems like you need to prise the questions out of them.

Blogs like this one are good for that – there’s usually a comments section and providing you don’t let it get over-run with spam comments that can be another great place to find what your customers want to know more about.

Encourage comments – when I remember, I put a comment in the post that says to add a comment below. Feel free to add your comments on that below.

If your customers are a quiet bunch then you probably won’t get many questions…

In which case you need to come up with other ways to get inside their minds and essentially guess what they’d like to know more about.

The best clues on this are the pages on your website.

Look at the content – or the titles if you’ve created those well – and see what are the most popular.

Your log files or analytics or stats pages will show you.

I like to look over a 30 or 90 day period.

That’s enough to get rid of any temporary blips caused by me sending out a link to a page – that kind of blip can be covered by seeing which other pages bounced up in popularity that day.

Then see what (if any) common theme these pages have.

Usually there will be one or two themes that crop up more often.

It’s then a matter of detective work to go back through those pages and work out where you could add depth by adding more content to your website.

Another way – which works well if you haven’t got many customers asking questions yet or if you’re branching out into a new market – is to search the web for questions.

Unless your topic is totally obscure, sites like Yahoo! Answers are a mine of information.

They have the added advantage that you’ll not only get the precise wording that customers (and potential customers) use but often also ideas in response that you’ve maybe never heard of or have forgotten about.

Once you start digging, you can usually come up with lots of different things that your customers potentially want or need to know.

Often it’s the small details that make the difference – things that you take for granted – because they can lead to light bulb moments for both you and your customers.

If you’d like to know more about how to quickly research keywords that your customers are searching for, check this offer.