How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas… About Anything
Generating ideas for writing can be tough. When you’re churning out blog posts on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis, trying to find cool and interesting blog topic ideas can get tricky. For most of us, inspiration doesn’t happen daily, and regularly coming up with click-worthy briefs can be arduous. But don’t fret — finding a good blog topic quickly and easily can be done! Let us break down for you how to come up with unique blog ideas about anything… and we do mean anything.
Keep it current
If you’re a marketer, you’ll know by now the value of seasonal content. Christmas, the World Cup, Black Friday — these events can provide you with some great brief ideas that’ll keep your readers hooked. But it’s not just national events that can capture your audience’s attention. Virtually any occasion can be used as inspiration for new blog ideas.
Stay up-to-date with national stories and memes that are trending. Twitter has a trends section that shows you the most talked-about topics at that time, a diverse blend of politics, celebrities, TV, music, or even just a cute dog video.
Get creative with these and work it into your content, for example: “What Katy Perry’s Left Shark Tells Us About Influencer Image”. Even the most tenuous of bridges can be leveraged to make a wider point about a topic if you’re creative enough, providing you with a truly unique blog idea that is guaranteed to be one-of-a-kind.
Learn (or copy) from the best
Even some of the most successful bloggers and brands are just dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. Finding what resonates with your audience can be tricky sometimes — the general public are a fickle bunch! But searching out content that is popular is a useful way of finding out what’s hot right now, and can help guide your own blog topic ideation too.
BuzzSumo is a great tool for this. As well as searching for specific topics, you can also search based on a domain URL too. Take the example below, using VICE’s site as our URL:
Image BuzzSumo
With BuzzSumo’s paid plan, users can adjust the date to the last 24 hours and find what content from rival sites or influencers is being shared most. Taking a deep dive into what’s trending on VICE, we can identify what works and why — and how we can use it to generate content ideas for our own blog, too.
You don’t need to match your competitor’s topics exactly, but it can provide you with enough inspiration to get your synapses firing. It’s not cheating, you’re just finding out what people want, then giving it to them!
Use a blog post idea generator
Blog post idea generators are the content marketer’s dirty little secret. No-one wants to admit they use them, but virtually everyone does. While they can be hit and miss at times, blog idea generators can help break through your writer’s block and deliver some moments of true inspiration.
There’s a huge number of content idea generators on the web, including HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator and Build Your Own Blog’s Idea Generator, but they all largely work the same way.
Take Portent’s Content Idea Generator, for example:
Image Portent
Simply enter in your keyword, and in one click you’ll have a quirky title for your next article. While it might take a few clicks to find the title that’s right for you, inspiration for blog ideas is only around the corner.
Generate ideas from keyword research
Keyword research is important, that much we know. It’s a vital aspect of SEO, and serves as the backbone of the content you produce. But it’s not all keyword stuffing and search engine ranking. Keyword research is also a great method for generating ideas for article topics.
This is because people search for things that they want to hear about — in a nutshell, they’re literally telling you what they want to read. To leverage this for blog post topic ideas, you need to start with a seed, a general topic that you can build from. For example, let’s search Keyword Tool for related suggestions and questions about graphic design.
Image Keyword Tool
Straight away, we’re presented with a huge list of potential article ideas. Take a look through and see what jumps out at you, then run with it. Using questions in particular is a very effective way to find good blog post ideas that people genuinely want to read by simply answering their questions!
Scour social media for hot topics
In the same vein, you could also seek out your audiences on social media to monitor their chatter. Heading to related forums, subreddits, and social media groups and seeing what topics are generating the most buzz online can help you understand the questions, queries, and thoughts that readers in your niche are having.
Struggling with content ideas with no topics to choose from? Reddit is a particularly handy tool for this. To date, there are more than 1.16 million subreddits on the site, dedicated to anything and everything under the sun — and above it as well! This gives bloggers of every niche a chance to dive in and see what their audiences are talking about. Just see the example below for all the blogging-related subreddits there are!
Image Reddit
Dip into some of these subreddits and find out what their members are talking about. Explore the different angles with which they approach the subject, and identify niche topics that interest them. It’s a great way to brainstorm blog post ideas, and you’ll soon stumble upon plenty of gems that can help inspire your next article.
Query Quora for quick ideas
No topic? No problem! The Q&A site Quora is also a great way to quickly generate dozens of ideas for your blog posts. Trawl the site to find popular questions that are related to your niche, then take a look at the answers to that question.
A typical open-ended Quora question is rife with conflicting answers and opinions, and it is this conflict that you’ll use for your blog posts. Discuss the pros and cons of each argument in an insightful, erudite, and enjoyable manner. You’ll soon have an informative and genuinely beneficial article that delivers real value to your readers.
Ask your audience
This one is so blindingly simple that you’ll be surprised you didn’t think of it earlier: simply ask your readers what they want to hear.
Your loyal followers regularly connect and engage with your content, and they like what you say and how you say it. Keep them coming back for more by simply requesting they contribute ideas too! Not only does it help foster a better relationship between you and your audience, but it can provide you with a huge range of ideas by looking at your niche with a different pair of eyes.
Start signing off your blog posts with invitations for comments and ideas from your readers, and you’ll never run out of ideas again.
Revamp or update existing content
Once you’ve written about a certain topic or idea, it’s out of bounds, never to be touched again, right? Wrong. If you’ve written a blog post that particularly resonated with your readers, go back to it. What was it about it that made it so popular? Why did it generate such interest? Once you’ve identified what it was that made it so effective, take it and rework it in a new format.
For example, an article about how to do Halloween-themed makeup could be turned into a listicle about top 10 Halloween makeup styles. Switch up the format a little, for example using infographics, lists, cheat sheets, videos, or interviews. Simply reformatting a piece and sprucing it up a little is enough to make it into a worth piece of content for your blog.
Another way to jazz up existing content is by updating it. Maybe the best top 10 free video editing software tools aren’t the same ones as a year ago? Or your readers want to see what the best horror films of this year are? Creating new content by updating old posts is a simple and easy way to formulate popular blog post ideas.
Brainstorming interesting and readable content ideas doesn’t need to be arduous. There are plenty of ways that you can come up with topics for your articles without breaking a sweat. Follow the tips and tools above, and you’ll never struggle to find interesting blog topics to write about again!