How to find ideas for the blog post?

Any person who writes his own blog faces the dilemma of choosing topics of interest for its readers. There are some people who don’t lack ideas for articles. However, there is a great majority who will struggle to find interesting topics for their blog.

Writing your own blog requires the author to constantly search for inspiration. Interesting topics  do not appear on their own, and any previously prepared list of topics will either become outdated or overused. 

Where to get ideas for articles that will catch the attention of our readers?

Before we look at ways to find interesting topics for your blog, it’s imperative to consider what your readers are looking for. The main reason for seeking and gathering information over the Internet is to solve specific problems people have. Some people want to learn something by reading blog articles. Yet there is another group of readers who’s just looking for entertainment, they hope to find amazing stories and interesting ideas.

Anyone who runs a blog page wishes to bring some measurable benefits. These benefits usually include new customers, more product sales, etc.

To achieve these results, new content must be published on a regular basis. No matter the creative power and experience of the author, Everyone will come to meet the “creative wall”. In other words, you will run out of ideas for blog topics.

In order not to affect the readers, It is recommended to come up with topics for the blogs in advance. It’s best to write down ideas, regularly, as soon as they come to mind.

You can do so on anything you wish; a piece of paper, in the cell phone, sticky notes. Do so in any digital or physical way you wish, as long as the idea doesn’t slip your mind. This technique guarantees you a list of ideas ready to go and will shorten the time on wondering what you could blog next.

However, what to do if you have started such a list, but you have to publish anything for your awaiting audience? There can be several solutions to apply in these cases. 

The above guidelines will find you to organize a structure to get inspiration from sources. We have divided them into:

  • Creative
  • Data Analytics

To get the most from this guide, use a combination of them to get the most. Knowing the structure and methods to get inspired, combined with the proper technological tools is not only effective but a smart step toward scalability and delivery

Blog topics – Creative ways

1. Read similar blogs, competition websites.

Check what is trendy around you. do not copy the topics but use is as inspiration for your own

Competition : “How to lose weight before Christmas”

Your post: “How not to gain weight during Christmas”

Can you see the analogy? Checking different sides of the competition can always inspire you to find new blind spots and hidden needs. 

2. Review your old posts.

Along the way, you might find yourselves in the need to update or develop further certain old posts. This Can be for many reasons, especially taking into account that technology changes every day, trends change every day, and worldwide need changes every day. therefore some articles will need an update or its data might have become obsolete in the meantime. Perhaps you can write articles with a promise for further updates once a certain time or conditions are met. This is a great way to maintain the public and reuse old entries.

As an example; make a list of the most popular topics / posts recently posted on your page.

This is a perfect end-of-year idea strategy. A post titled “10 most popular articles in my blog for 2020”  will surely gain great popularity.

This strategy does not necessarily have to be used only at the end of the year. If you run a tech blog for example. Write a post in the series: “10 tools to clean your PC”, “10 ideas for working desktops.”, Etc. This sort of post can be updated through time with new technologies and trends.

3. Check the industry

Dig around what’s happening in your industry in the near future. As an expert in your field, you have to make sure to follow the news. and be updated. After all, your readers want to be thrilled and filled with useful but digestible information. Everyone likes to stay up to date in their field

Browse through the latest books, publications, podcasts, or any other method in your industry, and write some reviews about it. Like every entrepreneur, you must maintain informedness through any means necessary. Reading can be by far the most nurturer habit, so get used to it. . Share your favorite ones with your audience and share your thoughts. As a word of caution, please always take into account any copyrights law applicable and prepare the proper references and author ownership 

As well, browse constantly portals related to your blog, and post your opinion on a popular topic. The most important part here is to pick a good, catchy title. Such posts can become quite popular as people might distrust an article but will eagerly hear the opinion of others, especially on current, popular topics.

Create intellectual discussions with other authors. As the leader of your blog, you are making sure to read other blogs and portals. If a given topic interests you, try to get into an open debate tho share points of vie

4 . Check important dates

This part is about checking what happened in the past days or a given day. Perhaps there was some kind of event or important date that would allow you to create a cool infographic, article, or opinion. Such content can become viral on the web. It is worth the risk.

5. Interview someone interesting in your industry (If possible)

This might sound like a tough step to make, however is an effective technique. Other bloggers, entrepreneurs, and celebrities are usually very eager to give interviews. This allows them to increase the group of people who know about them and, moreover, they can share their knowledge. 

It’s worth taking advantage that many of them won’t take a penny for an interview, just because there is a group of potential customers for them.

6. List of sharing

Make a list of 10 websites/blogs/fan pages/people in your industry and share it on your blog. Be sure to include links to the described items of the list. Share your opinion on a given page, fan page, or ask for an opinion on a given topic.

Open discussions over trendy or interesting topics create an atmosphere of open knowledge around your audience. They will be more receptive to what you have to say and therefore more interested in what you have to share and say. Openly discussing and analyzing an idea, keeping it within an objective structure, will spread to your viewers as a sign of constant growth, passion, and role model.

7. Reply to readers’ comments from historical posts

This step is best suited in the form of a separate blog post. Many people could happen to have similar problems. By checking historical comments, you might find a pattern as one, or more, of the readers, have raised-up similar comments and questions. If you can tackle this specific reader’s questions and propose a solution to the given problem, you will build an expert and detail-oriented brand, which will increase undoubtedly your trust perception

This trick will generate ideas for occasional posts, although they might not be good for the long run, such posts can be a source of additional traffic on your blog in the short term. The best examples of such posts are articles like:

  • “15  ideas for business in 2020”.
  • “ 7  recipes for warm drinks”
  • “ 6 tricks to enjoy summer on the beach”
  • “ How to exercise on rainy days”

9. Ask people

 Make a survey among readers to ask what topics they are interested in, what they would like to read about. You might be surprised by the number of ideas and problems they can bring. Seek to tackle this matter with interesting targeted posts. 

Use Google Forms tools and create a simple survey. Then send it to your readers – subscribe to the newsletter.

This step works more efficiently for people who already have an email list and a group of people on it. If you don’t have an email list at the moment, then post the survey on Facebook groups, friends, and forums and ask for anyone to kindly take some minutes to do it.

The survey should not contain too many questions and they should not be descriptive. Preferably a single or multiple choice field.

10. Browse thematic forums

When you want to find topics that will definitely captivate the interest of your target audience, then you should deeply dig around specific online forums relating to your specific industry or subject. The posts, questions, and problems appearing there can help you create not one, but a whole lot of useful articles.

Remember that the most effective way to find a forum is to type a general or more specific keyword into the Google search engine, or any search engine for that matter, and add the word “forum” next to it. Pay attention to the popularity of the topics, what questions are repeated the most often, and in which year the topic was created, as it may turn out that it’s outdated and irrelevant by now. 

Blog topics – Based on analytical data

Within this part, you will find tools and software that will help you gather and come up with ideas based on historical data and current trends gathered by search engines or companies

1. Auto-complete in Google search engine (google.com)

Is as simple as starting typing in the Google search bar. Potential phrases related to the query you enter will appear below. Suggestions are displayed according to the popularity of the currently searched words.

Bare to remember that for this method to work as its best, you must be signed as an incognito user in the browser. This avoids cache or cookies previously stored.

This tool is also provided by Google but is unknown to several people out there. This tool allows you to study the trend of a specific key phrase over a period of time. Very useful if you are checking the seasonality of a keyword.

Besides, to look for ideas for an article, you can use topics that are gaining popularity in Google over independent years. This is shown in the Related Topics and Related Queries sections, so you will know what topic of the article will be the most beneficial in the near future.

3. Data-driven Tools

While the manual research in Google Trends may take hours, there are ways to find trending topics much faster. Using data-driven tools like Topic Research, which is available for a free trial, will help you find trending geo-located topics.

Type a keyword or phrase you have in mind and find topics that have been trending online for the last 60 days. Trending topics are marked with a fire icon. Also, you’ll instantly see the topic volume, with which you can organically assess the interest of your audience.

4. Google news (news.google.com)

The Google News service collects the headlines of articles from websites and displays them filtered from the most relevant. It is an ideal tool if you do not have time to follow the news and look for trends. The application presents news from such categories as :, World, Local News, Business, Science and Technology, Entertainment, Sports.

Settings can be configured for every day, weekly, or monthly newsletter links to articles from the industry you are interested in. Currently, headers are collected from 60,000 reported portals. Moreover, we recommend adding your blog page to this service. Each portal is carefully checked in terms of content, quality, and technology, so joining this group can be very difficult, but it is definitely worth it.

Depending on where your audience tends to spend time, the exact steps of finding trends on each social platform may vary. However, the general workflow is the same, since the social trends are mostly personalized and tied to your profile interests.

Subscribe to your industry influencers and media leaders. Keep monitoring what’s being talked about and see what’s trending in your feed.

Evaluate posts by engagement. Compare the number of likes (or other kinds of reaction) to the number of subscribers to see the scale of the audience’s overall interest.

You may also want to check Reddit to see if there is a dedicated subreddit for your industry. If you’re lucky, you can sort posts by ‘Hot’ (trending) or ‘Top’ (most upvoted) topics within a given period of time. Besides trends, you can also use Reddit for keyword research to find more content ideas for your content strategy.

5. Facebook groups (facebook.com)

Groups and pages on Facebook are a helpful source of information. It’s worth looking for a blogging idea there. Just log in, or create an account if you don’t have one, select the “pages” or “groups” tab, and you will see a valuable mine of topics for your blog. Make sure to opt for the most shared and most commented ones.

6. Youtube -(youtube.com)

YouTube is undoubtedly one of the most visited portals in the world. It contains countless videos of the most various topics, ideas, and industries.

We guarantee that you will surely find interesting ideas for your blog here. To do so correctly make sure to use the search filters. Sorting by the number of views is an interesting and helpful way to find out what topics are most interesting for the audience.

What’s more, you can find out what type of construction the titles of the most popular films have. nothing prevents you from using it on your blog.

7. Keyword tool – (keywordtool.io)

It is a simple yet powerful tool. All you need to do is enter the key phrase to obtain which related phrases users enter into the search engine.

There are 3 independent tabs we recommend to check thoroughly:

  • Keyword Suggestions – keyword/phrase suggestions
  • Questions – questions related to our word
  • Prepositions – prepositions

They will allow you to find the most frequently searched terms by Internet users in a given topic. 

In the free version, we do not have access to information on how many people search for a given phrase, but our experience shows that they are sorted by the most popular. The tool is free with the option to purchase a PRO package.

Answer The Public (answerthepublic.com)

This is one of the most-used tools by copywriters and content marketing specialists. Even though it is of great inspiration for interesting titles and headlines, it also provides insightful and useful ideas for blog articles. All you have to do is enter a keyword and the algorithm will provide you with a sentence or phrase that includes the given words. Additionally, you can get all the proposals in a very simple and readable graphic form, which you can download in a .CSV file.

Ubersuggest  (neilpatel.com/ubersuggest)

Yet another tool that will help you research popular topics on your blog, but not only limited to this.

It is similar to a Keyword Tool, with an added feature that provides information about the monthly number of searches for a phrase. Thanks to this, you will accurately know which of the topics should be a priority. It will also help to identify which domains are indeed the greatest competitors 

Pay special attention to the Content Ideas add-on. It provides a list of articles on a given topic after entering keywords or domain addresses. It gives you the ability to narrow your search in terms of the presence, or exclusion of specific words. It provides as well the popularity and shareability of a specific post on Facebook and Pinterest. 

Try using the Keyword Ideas tab where you can find suggested phrases for a given query. It can inspire you with nice ideas to develop a blog.

Internet forums, eg Quora

As we discussed above within the creative methods. Using forums is an excellent way to pick and target trending topics.

To check if a given topic was discussed on a forum, you just need to use the google search engine with a slight modification; Enter a  keyword + “forum”, and a list of Internet forums with the given topic will be shown. Then just select a forum, enter it and browse through the most popular sections.

Forums are the perfect solution to test the attractiveness of a given topic for a niche blog. Additionally, you can find out what slang Internet users use for communication. In this way, you can adapt it to them and increase the effectiveness

BuzzSumo – app.buzzsumo.com

We must advise that BuzzSumo within the free version is quite limited – set to a specific number of searches and filters. However, if you know a few tricks it can work like a charm. 

We do not recommend using the free version as a daily tool for searching topics. If so, you will be better off signing to the paid plans. Nonetheless, is it a great way to expand your arsenal of tools and inspiration 

BuzzSumo works a bit like pairing the Google search engine with Ubersuggest. After entering a specific phrase in the search engine, you get a list of domains with the content on that specific topic. In addition to keywords, we recommend adding (depending on the specifics of the industry) :

  • “How”
  • “What”
  • “Where”
  • “When”
  • “How much”

It mainly takes into account in its results how often the keyword of interest to us is mentioned on social media such as:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit

Ideas Generator Blog – HubSpot

A tool that – as the name suggests – generates ideas for blog entries. it’s a powerful and intuitive enough platform to be handled without any problems. It only requires you to enter a few nouns (maximum 5), and click the magic button: “Give Me Blog Ideas”. It will generate you ready topics for articles. Within the free version, you get 5 searches, but you can unlock up to 250 templates.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs provides tons of information on given phrases. It finds expressions containing the phrase, similar searches, and questions. It will analyze the list of phrases on similar blogs or articles, not only over the Google Search engine but on Youtube and Instagram as well. You will be able as well to check how difficult it will be for you to jump into a good position on a given phrase and evaluate which topics will be easier to implement.

Ahref comes packed with a tool called “Content explorer” which deserves special attention, and which we consider being simply brilliant. It allows you to analyze thousands of pages and find keywords for even the most niche topics.

You can find similar tools in Semrush Topic Research and Moz – Content Suggestions

Brand24 and Google Alert

Media monitoring tools are a great way to come by with useful ideas when you least expect it. Among these tools, you can find solutions like Google Alert or Brand23

The tools will keep you informed about the news in the industry. By setting the phrases configuration in the user’s profile, you will receive an email summarizing the most important news and articles – thanks to this dedicated software you will be up to date with all new and relevant publications.

Brand24 also allows you to search several places over the Internet where the blog has been mentioned: it’s quite insightful and nurturing to know what they say about it. Without a doubt is a valuable source of information. 

It provides as well useful data for each and all of your entries and its popularity on social media – You might find comments that you didn’t catch before.

Brand24 is a paid tool but offers a free monthly trial version for you to test. We recommend checking it out and deciding on your own if you want to continue its subscription. Google Alert has no cost associated with it and is free to use for everyone. However, it is less precise and less effective than Brand24


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Anna Maria Świątecka

Anna Maria Świątecka

My mission is to teach the next generation of entrepreneurs how to make money online by building location Independent Businesses and live their lives to the fullest.
The world is your oyster. It's up to you to find the pearls." Chris Gardner 

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