It happens fairly frequently, at least to me. Clients who depend on a steady stream of blogs or articles will ask for what editors would call “pitches”: ideas for pieces that would resonate with their target audiences. 

In other words: they have run dry of inspiration internally and are putting the onus on me to help them out. Well then! I typically will sit and stare at the blank screen for a few minutes. But over the years I’ve learned some best practices that are helpful for coming up with ideas that I can successfully flesh out into high-traffic content for clients.

Know Their Business Inside and Out

This should go without saying. If an existing client is making the request, it should be a no-brainer – you should already be up to speed on their operations, competitive stance, and market share.  If it’s a new one, do your research by going through their website thoroughly, starting with the “About us” and (if a public business) “Investor relations” pages, and proceeding to absorb everything you can about the company’s products, services, practices, and finances. Download recent ebooks and white papers, and (of course) see what blogs or other types of articles have been published in the last six to 12 months. You should also do a search for specific mentions of the brand – not forgetting to scour social media posts from X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and LinkedIn, to see what others say about it, as well as what it says about itself. 

With this knowledge, you can write many different types of pieces, among them:

• Recent customer successes
• Profiles of employees – from executives down to line workers in factories or clerks in retail stores
• Reactions and analyses to topical industry news or events
• Tips on getting the most from the company’s products or services
• Put the company’s spin on a recently released industry report or survey 

Get up to Speed on the Company’s Latest “Messaging” and Marketing Campaigns

Companies with competent marketing leaders or teams won’t let their brand positioning stagnate. They’ll constantly stay on top of customer wants, needs, and concerns, and will refresh the messages they send to the market to reflect current trends. They’ll use those messages to build campaigns across a wide range of channels. You can learn a ton – and get great article ideas – from changes in messaging, no matter how subtle, as well as from campaign outreaches.

Look to Insiders to Understand What’s Currently Topical in Their Market Segment

You should also check out what’s going on in your client’s industry or specific market at the moment. Specialty (“trade”) publications, websites, blogs, and newsletters exist that cover every hiccup of just about every segment of every industry – it’s their mission to dig deeply into what’s concerning professionals in each type of business, whether retail, construction, manufacturing, real estate, or other. Take retail. You can get tremendous insights from publications and sites such as Retail Dive, Retail4growth.com, Independent Retailer, Retail Gazette, or Daily Retail News without even scratching the surface of what’s out there. The same goes for all other industries. 

By reading these ultra industry insiders, you’re likely to generate lots of ideas that will be relevant to your audience.

Check out the Competitions’ Content

I always keep tabs on themes and issues that competitors are focusing on as well as content the client itself is producing. Not that you want to follow (rather than lead) your competitors or copy what they are doing. But you can certainly get a sense of how your client is differentiating itself from others, and it can spark inspiration on how you can write articles that will accentuate the strengths of your client’s approach to the market.

Use Trend Discovery Tools that Tell You What’s Relevant Now

Naturally, I keep my ear to the (virtual) ground through Google alerts, social media, and the extremely valuable Reddit forums. But this isn’t the most efficient (or scientific) way to spot what’s hot and worth writing about. 

There’s a category of invaluable technology that can help. Called “trend discovery” tools, these use a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and human analysts to search through data from sources like Reddit, Quora, Google Search, Amazon, YouTube, podcasts, and other news sources to identify topics of current high interest in the world. 

My favorite happens to be Exploding Topics. But there are many, many others that do a lot of the heavy lifting of trend spotting for you – Google Trends, Trend Hunter, and Trend Watchers, to name just a few. Most allow you to search on company names, keywords, topics, industries…you name it. Most of these tools will slice and dice and even graphically display data for you, and might even identify what’s happening in the world of your client before they realize it. 

Seek Surprises as You Look Around

To write articles capable of driving solid traffic, you can’t just recycle the same-old, same-old content. You have to continually come up with new topics, new angles, and new ways of thinking. This can be challenging. I always judge whether something is worth writing about by how surprised I am by it – whether it’s a startling fact, an interesting trend, or an anecdote that resonates. In other words, I’ve learned to trust my gut: If I find something interesting, others will, too. Or if I have questions about a topic or issue, chances are good that other people also have questions. It makes exploring that topic or issue a productive exercise for developing fresh, compelling content.