Why ContextMinds is your best choice for a content suggestion tool

Content originality and quality is important - even for SEO

Writers and content creators are facing an unprecedented challenge today: It’s become harder than ever to make your writing stand out, to rise above the growing sea of “me-too” content and capture the attention of your target audience.

Because of this, unique story ideas and angles are no longer a “nice to have,” they’re a necessity.

Where can writers turn for help? 

In response to these needs, a growing number of content suggestion tools have emerged that aim to help writers to brainstorm new topic ideas. They’re usually based on keywords and a library of content formulas that tend to be popular with readers.

These tools include:

   
• Portent’s Content Idea Generator                    
   
• Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator                    
   
• Semrush                    
   
• BuzzSumo                    
 

Random topic generators

The first two tools, Portent’s Content Idea Generator and Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator, are random topic generators. That is, you type in a topic and they present you with a variety of unique headlines based on it. Here are some of the ideas they recently produced based on the search term "writing":  

Portent’s Content Idea Generator                

   
• Why writing is the New Black                    
   
• Why writing is more tempting than a Cinnabon                    
   
• 10 uses for writing                    
   
• 12 unexpected ways writing can give you better hair                    
   
• The 7 worst songs about writing                    
 

Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator                

   
• Writing: Expectations vs. reality                    
   
• Will writing ever rule the world?
   
• The next big thing in writing?
   
• Writing explained in fewer than 140 characters                    
   
• This week's top stories about writing                    
 

As you can see, these ideas are quite random and – let's be honest – useless. To have value, content ideas must not only be unique, but relevant and emotionally engaging to your ideal audience. Also, because these ideas are based on popular content types, they tend to be too formulaic – just like tens of thousands of similar online articles.

In other words, these tools aren’t very useful at helping you differentiate your writing. Remember, you want it to stand out, not be part of the “background noise” that people tend to ignore.

Content SEO tools                  

Semrush is a suite of content research and planning tools. It includes a topic research tool that reveals popular words and phrases people are using to search for topics related to yours.

BuzzSumo's topic suggestion tool displays popular content that’s related to your tool, the questions people are asking Google as well as keywords related to your topic. It’s not a brainstorming tool, but more of a suite of tools for identifying “hot” topics you can leverage to improve your SEO ranking.

Focusing on trending topics too much won't attract attention                      

There's only one problem: These tools tend to be heavily focused on SEO. They can’t help you generate unique yet relevant ideas to differentiate your story and attract the attention of your target audience.

Why ContextMinds is a better solution                

While these four tools may be incredibly popular with writers, they don’t solve the underlying problem we’ve been discussing: Helping writers develop truly creative, distinctive ideas that help them rise above the din and capture the attention of their ideal audience.  

ContextMinds, a relatively new concept mapping tool, is based on a different paradigm: it utilizes AI to suggest a variety of fresh ideas and concepts. It helps writers through the entire creative process – from brainstorming their ideas to organizing, nurturing and developing them into complete visual outlines.

Here's how it works:

As you add topics to a ContextMinds visual map to outline your writing, the application automatically displays a variety of related, AI-generated words and concepts in a horizontal panel at the bottom of the workspace. This powerful “serendipity engine” displays a different set of concepts each time you select a topic.

You can drag and drop any of these idea nuggets into your map to enhance it. Each one represents a potential trigger to help you generate additional ideas. This unique feature jump-starts your thinking in new directions and can empower you to develop more unique ideas, angles and storylines.

This approach is more flexible than keyword suggestion tools and random topic generators. It doesn’t just help you brainstorm unique and compelling topics, it enhances your outlining and writing processes as well. A steady stream of fresh concepts and insights can also help you sidestep writer’s block, improve your creative “flow” and truly help you to differentiate and elevate your writing style.

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New ContextMinds enhancements delight writers                        

A recent update makes ContextMinds’ keyword capabilities even more powerful: You can filter the contents of the related concepts window by keywords – for SEO analyses – trending questions from web searches, your personal collection of concept maps or the entire ConceptMinds community. This enables you to zero in on the ideas and concepts that can help you take your writing to the next level. Here’s a closer look at two of these filters:

   
• Keywords: When you click on a keyword in the related concepts window, the right-hand information panel displays its search volume, so you can decide if it’s worthwhile to create content based upon it. We realize that many content writers must perform their own SEO keyword analysis; our goal is to help you streamline this process.
   
• Questions: Think of this as a concept map version of the popular visual search engine, Answer the Public. Increasingly, web searchers are using questions to search for answers using Google and other search engines. Often, the questions they ask can provide content writers with important insights into their audience’s needs, challenges and aspirations – a rich source of inspiration for writing to address them. ContextMinds displays these frequently-asked questions as related concepts that you can drag and drop into your concept maps.                              
 

Enhance your research - easily                

As you add topics to your maps, the right-hand panel displays additional information about each of them. The latest version of ContextMinds adds buttons to request more suggestions from its powerful AI engine. They can come from two sources:

   
• Web search, which shows you what’s already been written on your topic and enables topic research without leaving ContextMinds and losing focus, and           
   
• The AI text generation engine, which can provide you with more inspiration or with paragraphs you can cite directly in your article or adapt to your needs,
 

You can easily pin any of these additional search engine results to your topic notes, giving you an easy way to collect and organize your writing research.

New outline tool helps you make sense of it all                

As you conduct online research for a writing project and use these powerful tools to collect ideas and information for your next writing project, how can you distill what you’ve gathered into a cohesive story? ContextMinds’ new outlining tool makes this easy. To start building an outline, simply drag one topic over another. Dragging it to the right of the first topic indents it, enabling you to quickly build a hierarchical outline of your next writing project.

This simple, elegant outliner makes it easy to bring order out of the chaos of your research. The ability to see all of your topics and your outline side-by-side makes it easy to see what other elements you should add to it. This arrangement can also help you decide where to place them within the sequence of your story.

ContextMinds enables you to create multiple lists or outlines within a single concept map, ideal if you’re trying to:

   
• Organize the chapters of a book,                              
   
• Maintain a list of research or writing tasks you need to remember,                    
   
• Lay out a sequence of messages for a marketing campaign, and                    
   
• Manage other list-based writing tasks.
 

As you add concepts to your outlines, you can easily insert new topics within them and move topics from one list or outline to another.

In conclusion, ContextMinds offers writers an expanding toolset that provides much more value than random topic generators and SEO-focused topic research and suggestion tools.

If you’re looking for a way to inject fresh ideas and approaches into your writing, why not give ContextMinds a try?