If you’re lucky enough to have long-term clients on Upwork who want content from you every week (in some cases 2-3 articles per week), you will sometimes run out of ideas. Your client will come back with answers like “I already have a lot of content on that topic” or “not really part of my remit”. This is what happens when you write every week; you can’t always come up with brilliant ideas. So what to do?

Before I go on, I will say that it’s important (and you should know this already) to use reputable sources and reference properly where applicable.

Industry Blogs

One of your first ports of call should always be blogs by industry professionals. If there’s anything professionals love to do, it’s offer their opinions on the hot topics, and they will usually do it for free. Sometimes out of altruism, and sometimes because it’s good to get their name out there and generate leads and business, good quality blogs are always a great mine for ideas. It’s important that you simply don’t copy what they have written though or perform a crude rewrite. Are there ideas you can extract? Any single point you could expand on to create an entire blog post?

Industry Magazines

Magazines, whether online or hard copy, can also be very good sources. Many of these articles will be quite long – 1,000 to 2,000 words, sometimes even more and you shouldn’t have much difficulty extracting a few ideas even out of one article. Magazines can be a great wealth of ideas but they can be expensive to buy. Where articles are not freely available on the web, you may even be able to piece together an article from the headline and research ideas elsewhere.

Newspapers

They may not be your first port of call, but for some areas they can be a brilliant source if you need “in the news” type of information such as a change to the law or a big news event. It’s a good way of getting short term SEO boosts and generating discussion in providing up to date information for your client’s readers. Don’t disregard newspapers just because they go against your political view on an issue; getting a variety of information about a single story from different sources can help you build the complete picture. Newspapers with a strong political bent will nearly always leave out inconvenient information – this is just as true of left and right wing media so leave your personal politics at the door.

Getting New Ideas From The Old

Old posts are a great source for new ideas and there are two things you can try. Firstly, go back through your own posting history for that client to see if there is anything from which you can create a new post. For example, you might have written “Top 5 most liveable cities in England”. One of those items might be Bristol but you only wrote a quick 90-100 word summary. You could create a blog post called “7 Reasons Why Moving to Bristol Would Be a Great Career Choice”. Another option would be to go through the posting history of the site, from before you were writing for that client, and see if you could mine those for new ideas. Internal backlinks are good for a site’s SEO so make sure you link back to the old content either way.

Blog Topic Generators

I’ve not found these particularly useful, mostly because I don’t write clickbait and the titles that come back are nearly always clickbait-y. However, if that is what you write then I am certain you will find it infinitely useful in throwing in a few superlatives. These are good for personal blogs and content that is a little light-hearted, but not so much for professional content where the readers expects a certain standard.