For many content marketers, getting articles out there is a race against the clock.

There are (typically) 40 hours in a workweek, quality articles take roughly 10 hours per article to write, and you obviously have other responsibilities (like social media) to tend to on top of the actual blog content, which leaves not very much time to brainstorm topics.

How do you juggle all of this and keep crankin’ out wonderful, crave-inducing content on a consistent basis?

How do you get your brain to make the topics flow like fine wine at an extravagant party?

Everywhere you look online, marketers are boasting about how this one man writes ten original, engaging articles per week “ all by himself!”

You think you’ve finally found someone who struggles with the same challenge as yourself...

...until you figure out that, really, he has a team of five doing the dirty work while he takes all the credit, at which point your heart sinks and the feeling of overwhelming defeat floods over you as you realize that this guy actually isn’t in the same boat as you after all.

And so you grudgingly drag your disillusioned self back to square one.

As a one-woman content marketing team, as I like to call myself, I know how hard it can be. And one of the hardest parts of keeping the blog stocked up on quality content is quickly and efficiently figuring out what the dickens it is you should write about in the first place.

That’s why I’ve taken my own challenges and solutions to the dreaded content topic void and compiled them in this handy list so that you can make your job as the uber-important, exceptionally-swamped purveyor of content that much easier.

1. Schedule company-wide (or at least marketing team-wide) brainstorming sessions once per month, or as needed.

It’s amazing how many ideas a group of four people can come up with in just an hour!

I decided to organized this type of meeting for the first time after hitting some major writer’s block, and the first brainstorming session was so productive, I walked out of the conference room with three full pages of notes.

Three. Whole. Pages.

I can’t even begin to tell you how elated I was when walking out that door, clutching my future article seeds close to my heart.

Sometimes, being a content marketer can narrow your ideas into just the marketing side of business, so getting input from other departments, such as sales, development, design, customer service, leadership, and more can help open plenty of new doors for content inspiration.

It’s also good to take a break from being solely responsible for the task of coming up with new topics; that way, you can think more clearly and identify areas of topics that haven’t even crossed your mind yet.

2. Speak with your sales team about frequently asked questions from leads or existing clients.

Look no further than your sales buddies to get a sense of what conundrums your ideal customers currently have.

The job of the sales team is to provide all the information necessary for prospects to make a purchase decision, so they will be the ones directly receiving oodles of questions during the process.

Those questions are perfect material for your blog, as responding to qualms in in-depth articles shows that you not only get your target market, but also that you’re willing and ready to help them make whatever needs to happen, well, happen.

3. Use the power of analytics to identify best-performing content, then dig deeper or give it a new spin.

Your existing content can lend clues as to what your audience wants to know about.

Take a look at your website’s analytics to identify which articles are the best-performing based on traffic and time spent on the page.

After you find your prime content, read through it again and try to find points that could be expanded upon in great detail and length, approach the topic with a new perspective, or even write about a related subtopic and create a series out of it.

The point is, digital marketing is constantly and rapidly evolving - and it’s applicable to so many industries that have their broad and specific scopes, so there is always new or changing information to be covered.

4. Newsjack if possible, or at least have a topic ready for if something heavily anticipated happens.

Newsjacking is when your brand takes advantage of a trending news story, typically by injecting the brand into the story or giving the topic a twist that ties into your brand’s image.

Though some areas of the news are rather unpredictable, others can be routine enough to prepare for, like holidays or long-awaited or popular events.

If you think of a topic that is a little weak on its own, try relating it to current events, and put it on hold until the news breaks. Just be careful, as you don't want to do something horrible like make light of a tragedy to promote your new line of designer slippers.

Tying your industry to current events is a great way to drive readers who are already captivated by the news to your website to boost SEO and traffic.

5. Reach out to thought leaders or industry experts for advice in an interview format.

This may be the easiest kind of content you’ll write once you snatch up a ready and willing interviewee who has a lot of great insight to relay.

All that you have to do is prepare a list of questions, schedule a time to sit down and do the interview, then transcribe it.

Known experts give the content instant credibility and recognizability, and they provide the content guided by your questions, which saves you from hours of doing your own research.

If you can’t possibly come up with a topic to interview someone on, you could consider giving them the gift of choosing their interview topic, which takes even more off your full plate.

6. Interview an underdog or successful person in your industry about how they achieved success.  

There are millions of small businesses in the U.S., and the odds are stacked against them: about 90% of businesses fail within the first five years.

That means the triumphant ones are worth interviewing to gain insight as to what it’s like to fight the uphill battle and win.

Besides, writing about the smaller players in your industry is a win-win: they get free publicity, you get great content to add to your blog.

And, just like with #5, most of the work is in nabbing the right person who will spill the beans to you - all you have to do is round them up and record their knowledge.

7. Test something, walk through the process, the results, and then write about it.

This works best for topics that you can’t find the answer to already on search engines.

For example, when our company’s Instagram engagement plummeted, I scoured the internet for answers, only to find some forum hypotheses that were at most questionable in terms of credibility.

So, I reached out to Instagram, rounded up every answer I could find online, ran a couple small experiments until I found the solution, then wrote an article about my findings.

This article has been garnering the most traffic to our blog by far, likely because no one else has written about it in such depth, and all I did was talk about a topic that I already was dealing with as part of a different side of my job.

People love these kinds of posts because they likely are struggling with the same problem and don’t have the time or resources to dig deeper, so they can safely and happily turn to you to walk them through the whole ordeal instead.

8. Ask your online community about their challenges.

Instead of spending a lot of time researching and deciding upon a topic that you think your audience will tune in to read, just ask them about what they are struggling with to find out what you know they’ll read.

The easiest way to collect this kind of information is through surveys: Twitter or Facebook polls, Google forms, or even platforms like Survey Monkey are all great tools you could use.

Not only will your followers appreciate a chance to be heard, but you’ll guarantee that your topics will resonate directly with them - after all, they are the ones who chose them!

9. Share internal news: new projects, services, or team members; challenges overcome; quirky bits about company culture; etc.

Writing about your company is a great way for readers to get to know you better, especially when your business has national clients that can’t easily meet with you in person.

This kind of topic also allows you to create a sense of intimacy by letting the reader inside your business’s day-to-day life, which also promotes transparency in how you do business.

The easiest part of coming up with topics about internal happenings is that there is no research required since it’s about the people and business you are already exceedingly familiar with. Hooray!

10. Use Google’s autocomplete feature and free keyword tools to narrow in on specific elements of broad topics.

So you want to write about SEO, but everyone does that, and the internet doesn’t need any more “complete guide to everything about SEO ever” articles...trust me.

Besides, writing about a heavily-covered topic like SEO 101 will likely (and ironically) just hurt your website’s SEO, as other more established sites have already commandeered the top results on that topic anyway.

With the help of autocomplete and free keyword tools, you can take a general topic and really dig deep to find a new angle or hyper-specific, scarcely-covered subtopics that are of importance to your audience.

I use a few tools for this method:

• Google Keyword Planner: great for getting search volume data and trends to locate what people are searching for right now and capitalizing on that. One downside: you need to set up an AdWords account to access, but it’s completely free.

• Google’s autocomplete feature: by far the easiest and most accessible tool - just type in a keyword or start a phrase, and Google will autocomplete with a lengthy dropdown list that you can browse for inspiration or to refine your search further. Type, scan, refine, rinse, and repeat.

• Keyword Shitter (no, really): pardon my French, and also hear me out - this free tool is simple, fast, and yields hundreds of keyword phrases once you plug in some rough starter ideas. Plus, you can filter out negative keywords so you don’t end up with diluted results.

There are other keyword research tools that you could purchase or utilize the free trial for, but the list above covers my favorites that encompass all the tools I actually need and use.

Finally, I have one bonus topic-deriving method that half-counts because the ten points above are all about coming up with new, unused topics, and this last tactic is more like content upcycling. (And upcycling is sooo in these days.)

Bonus: Repurpose old content in new formats.

Take any old article and jazz it up: make it into a bite-sized, visually appealing infographic that’s easy for your audience to download.

Or, you can get more tech-savvy and repurpose articles as podcasts, live video interviews, plain ol’ videos, and more. Get creative!

If an old article never performed as well as expected, maybe it was delivered in the wrong format to your audience and could use a makeover.

The benefit here is that you can play around with the type of content that resonates best with your audience and skip the tediousness of coming up with a completely new topic every time.

That's all for now...

I hope this list helped to ignite a topic-frenzy fire inside of you, fellow solo content marketer.

Tell me, have you found relief from mental topic-depletion in other ways? I’d love to hear your thoughts below!