How do some websites (perhaps even your competitor’s) always seem to nail it with their content? They have several comments and dozens of shares. Your SEO shows you their ideal quantity of backlinks, and it seems like all this comes rather easily to other sites.

Meanwhile, you chug along slowly and never seem to get anywhere. So, just how can you unearth those truly amazing, too-powerful-to-fail ideas?

Here are some tips!

1. Know Where Great Content Ideas Don’t Come From

First, it’s important to understand how great ideas (typically) come about. Despite what you may think, they don’t arise from within the author’s own head. In other words, content creators don’t simply sit around daydreaming until an amazing idea comes along and BOOM! Great content is born.

There is a bit of an exception to this. For example, some authors know their audience so well that they can accurately anticipate exactly what they will enjoy and appreciate. You can think of these folks as the Steve Jobs of their niche—they know what their audience wants before their audience even does. Yet, these circumstances are rare…and difficult! It takes years of content creation experience to acquire this skill, and even then, authors don’t always succeed.

Remember the golden rule of content: there’s a huge difference between what your audience wants and what you think they want.

2. Keep a Swipe File

What’s a “swipe file?” It’s simply a list of all your various content ideas. As soon as you come across an idea—no matter how that takes shape—and believe your audience would like it, jot it down in your “swipe file” and take note of how you found the same.

While you’ll typically have dozens (or maybe hundreds) of ideas, only a few will actually turn into content.

3. Learn the True Source of Great Content

Your audience, market, or customers—whatever you want to call them—are your most consistent source for great content ideas. Think of ideas that grow within your own mind as “home runs.” When one hits and does well, that’s awesome! Yet, you’ll definitely strike out a lot too. When you glean ideas from your audience, you’ll hit a much better average overall: leading to additional shares, links, and (most importantly) sales.

To get ideas, just ask your customers about their problems. What’s their greatest fear? What really makes them angry?

Study high-performing posts on competitive blogs. Think of the questions customers ask you over and over again. This is a great strategy to generate content that will capture your audience’s interest and transform them into happy, paying customers.

You can sprinkle in some of your own ideas too to test the waters in that regard. Then, after you gather data about your audience’s reception to these posts—by measuring shares, links, bounce rate, and time on-page—you can begin to learn how to give them more of what they truly want.

As you get further into this process, you’ll find great content ideas all around you and won’t have nearly enough time to create them all. But you will have a reliable, consistent system for generating posts that fascinate your audience and drive sales.