The internet thrives on content but there are times when you end up staring at a blank screen, wondering what you should write about today.

This affects everyone at some stage or another but it should be a quickly passing phase. Otherwise you won’t get anything new created and your site will run the risk of stagnating.

Ask your list

If you’ve got a list of any sort, you can ask them.

Assuming that your list is still reading your emails, a quick email asking what they’d like to know more about can work nicely.

In fact, it’s worth adding in to your autoresponder sequence every now and then to keep you fresh with ideas.

Use forums

Forums are a great place to get ideas.

Providing the forum is lively – and you probably shouldn’t be looking at it on a regular basis if it isn’t – then there will be questions being asked all the time.

Some of them will be the same old questions that crop up near enough daily. Maybe because people haven’t checked other posts – searches on forums have never seemed to be particularly good – maybe because they’re in lazy mode.

It doesn’t matter whether the question has been asked once or hundreds of times.

It will often be the same question, asked in a slightly different way.

If that’s the case, you’ve just been given a potential subject idea on a plate.

Use it!

Use the news

This is done by PR companies all the time.

Here in the UK, you can almost predict the statistics produced by the supermarkets every Christmas: how many tons of brussels sprouts have been sold, that kind of thing.

Any major event has all sorts of news stories released around it, often only very loosely related to the news itself.

Some events like Christmas have the advantage of being in your calendar so you can prepare in advance for them.

Other events are likely to be in a certain time window – the Royal birth here in the UK provided news headlines for weeks ahead and weeks since.

If you don’t keep up with the news – and that’s actually a good habit to get into – then just set up a few Google alerts related to your industry and you’ll get ideas delivered to your inbox.

Check your old pages

Unless your site is brand new, you’ll have written about things before.

Skim one or two of your old pages and expand on what you’ve written there.

If you create your content with subheadings like this page then you’ll have several different things you can write about – I could easily create a post on each of the subheadings on this page that went into more detail about what to do.

You can do the same with your old pages.

Check other people’s lists

Lots of websites produce lists – they’re easy to create and easy to read.

Chances are, one or two of these will show up in the first few pages of the search results.

All you need to do is click through to one of the lists, skim it and choose one of the topics as the one you’re going to create some content about.

Don’t plaigiarise the site, obviously.

But by all means use it for inspiration!

Feel free to add your ideas in the comments area below this post.

If you’d like more help, check out my content creation crash course here.