One of the biggest challenges facing businesses who are wanting to up their content marketing efforts in the year ahead will be in coming up with good ideas on a regular basis.

If you have a fresh perspective or a niche that your business slots nicely into, working out what to write can be easy. But once you’ve exhausted those ideas, it can be a real struggle figuring out how to write more.

Having a good idea once in a while isn’t enough, but neither is spending hours trying to come up with good content marketing ideas. All that this will result in is a huge waste of time during a mentally draining and frustrating process (adding onto the writer’s block you might also be facing).

One way you can counter this outcome is to look out for pieces of published content that are already good but could be improved upon. Finding already used content ideas on the internet and turning them into something great is a fast and easy-to-use method businesses can use to write great content. For example, if you’re a cafe looking for ways to invite people to your business, you could see what others in the industry are posting or have previously posted for inspiration.

In no way should you simply copy an article (that would involve copyright infringement, and is a whole other issue that you’d be dealing with on top of finding content). The basic idea behind this process is to read the content and think about how to improve upon the piece’s overall angle or idea.

Here are three ways in which businesses can do this:

Expand On The Article’s Content

While longer articles take more time to read, they can be beneficial from an SEO perspective since longer content ranks higher in Google searches. You should be careful not to make an article boring by adding length to it; the value needs to be increased by adding more information, rather than just words.

For example, if an accounting firm found an article called ‘Seven ways to boost your retirement savings’’, they could make it more valuable by adding additional details and more options on how to boost retirement savings i.e. “Ten ways to boost your retirement savings”.

Make The Article More In-Depth

Articles that are already quite lengthy usually lack any real depth. By adding more depth to valuable aspects of each section of the article, firms can add a lot more value to the original content idea.

Make It More ‘Readable’

Businesses may also find content that has a lot of value but only to certain audiences. Taking the content, and catering it to a different type of audience means that they can write about similar topics, but make them more accessible to others. They can also make content more readable by adding pictures, including a good amount of white space, and using a good clear font style.