I am indebted to Roxanne Jenkins for a super helpful article about resolving the content crisis many of us face:

If you have been marketing for any length of time, you should know that content is king when it comes to successful online promotions, but so many people seem to struggle with coming up with content worthy enough to get picked up by the search engines. Sometimes it seems almost impossible to come up with creative content. In fact, experienced marketers know that content marketing (when done properly) can attract thousands of visitors a day to their website or blog.  This leads to a growing subscriber list and building a huge fan base for your products or services. To make your life easier, here are some tools you may not be aware of that can help you come up with fresh content so you can start driving that much needed traffic to your offer.

BuzzSumo – Find the most popular content on ANY given topic.

BuzzSumo gives you detailed social media stats all in one beautiful dashboard. Find the most shared content and the key contributors who are sharing it. Or simply search for your main keyword and get a list of the most relevant contributors on that topic.

The number of things that you can do with this tool are endless. Be sure to play around with the “Advanced Search” tools as well. There are some hidden gems in there :)

Topsy.com – This is one of the first social media search engines I started using online. Topsy allows you to find the most popular content on Twitter, who’s sharing it, and the key influencers around that topic at any given time. Perfect for generating content ideas AND for blogger outreach.

My favorite feature is being able to find the KEY influencers who have shared a specific piece of content. Simply enter a blog post url and click search.  On the results page you’ll see EVERY person who has retweeted that content. Pretty cool right?

But it get’s better… There’s also a tab at the top that says “Influential Only”. Click on that and you’ll see only the most influential people who have shared that article. Instant goldmine. Start building relationships with these awesome people. Find ways to add value for them FIRST and they’ll be happy to do the same when you release your next epic blog post!

Feedly – Aggregate all of your favorite blogs in one simple dashboard. I use Feedly to find cool content to share online. Plus, it’s a great tool for finding an endless number of content ideas.

TagBoard.com – Find interesting content on ANY topic. Simply enter a hashtag and tagboard will pull in great content from across the web. It aggregates all of the recent posts from Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, and others that contain that specific hashtag. This real-time social search engine is an endless oasis of content ideas.

AllTop.com – Aggregates the best of the web. Here you can find all of the top blogs on any given topic. Simply select a category and you’ll be taken to a one-page dashboard with the best blogs in that industry AND their 5 latest blog posts. An endless number of content ideas all on one page :)

Social Crawlytics – Identify the most popular content on ANY website. This tool provides some of the most in-depth social sharing data available online. Plus, with a few extra clicks you can see which posts we’re most popular on Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, or Facebook. So you know exactly what TYPE of content works best for each of the different platforms.

You can also use Social Crawlytics to find out the top influencers who are sharing a website’s content.

They call them “Content Amplifiers”.

You can also use this tool to identify the most popular content on your OWN website. This tells you exactly what sort of content your audience probably wants MORE of. Which can lead to new blog post ideas, products, and services.

Scoop.it – Find an endless number of content ideas by doing a quick search on Scoop.it.

Quora – This is One of my favorite Q & A site. What’s unique about Quora is that the questions are almost always unique. With sites like Yahoo Answers, there are hundreds of bland, boring questions.

But on Quora, there are thousands of interesting, intelligent questions being asked daily. Which can lead you to new angles for your content.

Find out what sort of questions are being asked in any given niche. Then answer those burning questions on your own blog. This is by far one of my favorite hot spots for finding new and interesting article ideas. Or email ideas. Video ideas. or a topic for my next podcast :)

UberSuggest. Great for long-tail keyword research.

List.ly – One of the coolest sites for unlimited list post ideas. Simply type in your keyword to get hundreds of article ideas. Also a great place to find headline ideas.

So what do you do with all this new content you ask?  Simple, share it by doing some blog postings. That's right, writing on other people’s blogs can introduce you to a new audience and create a surge of new traffic to your site or blog. You can find more information and a great social community of entrepreneurs at Markethive.