There are over 600 million blogs on the internet and about 2 million new posts are published daily according to recent statistics. And these statistics are still headed up as most marketers say blog content creation is a top priority in their inbound marketing. For this reason, marketers and bloggers in general are searching for more blog ideas in their quest to increase or maintain their audience.
With this need to keep up with the competition, it’s possible that you’ve reached a point, at which you’ve run out of blog topic ideas, yet you still need to draw eyes and drive traffic to your page. And while this is a fine goal, a serious lack of blog post ideas can make frequent and regular blogging a difficult task. It’s even worse when you can’t think of relevant content that rhymes and resonates with your audience, and the question is how to come up with blog ideas that will work.
So, before diving into what to blog about ideas you must first ask yourself whether you have a content creation strategy. An effective strategy in itself is a great motivator for some of the most brilliant and effective blog post ideas. It acts as a foundation from which your blog ideas spring up. You therefore cannot afford to miss one. Here are a few of the most important content strategies.
The Basis of a Content Strategy
How to come up with blog ideas starts with:
1. Know Your Audience
It goes without saying, before searching for exciting blog ideas you must know who you’re writing for. This will help you identify their problems or needs and interests. It will give you an idea of what they want and this is what you will base your content on.
Remember being able to solve your audience’s problem must remain your focus, even if all that brings them to your blog is entertainment, then entertainment is what they must get. If they won’t find what they’re looking for in your blog, they won’t have a reason to stay or come back.
How do you do this?
Sketch out these key pieces with respect to your intended readers:
i. What problems or needs are they facing and which ones do you want to address first?
ii. How well-versed with the topic are they?
iii. What’s the goal of your blog topic? Is it to motivate? Educate? Entertain or inspire?
This information will be the first pointer to the direction your blog topic ideas will come from.
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2. Audit Your Competition
This is not rocket science, pay attention to the news (especially online related to your niche). If for instance, you think you’ve landed a great blog idea, search it on Google and take a keen look at what your competition is saying and how they’re ranking and use this to make your blog idea a few times better. Make it a wow post.
How?
i. Do more, if your competitor made a list of 10 things, you can create one with 15, or give it an extra boost with free tips, offer solutions plus some sort of bonus for your readers.
ii. Personalize your blog post ideas with a touch of your personal experience to make them unique.
iii. Give it a personality and take advantage of multimedia. Video for instance improves the shareability of your content because people generally love videos and images more than plain text.
3. Put the Pen Down, Read More
Your mind needs some flexing. And reading is one way to flex your mind and induce more creative and inspiring ideas.
Pick up something and read, it doesn’t have to be within your niche, it could be as far from your niche as the East is from the West, but just read something and avoid writing for a while. You’ll spring back with a load of brilliant blog ideas.
4. What Makes You Stand Out?
Your readers will need a reason to come to your blog and not go to the next one, so, what makes you unique or different from the others? Therefore, you must have this thought when planning for blog ideas as this is the point at which you’ll sell or not.
With this basic content creation strategy, you’ll find it less tedious to come up with relevant and great blog ideas. This article also offers bonus tips to take your blog topics to another level, but first, here is how to come up with blog ideas.
How to Find Blog Ideas That Are Guaranteed to Win
1. Keyword Research
Most often you use keywords in your content for ranking purposes, relevant keywords drive quality traffic. It’s therefore important to understand what those potential customers are looking for through the use of keyword search data provided by Google, and this will give you great insights for your next blog ideas.
2. Leverage Questions on Forums for Blog Topic Ideas
You’ve probably heard about Quora, this is one of those platforms where people go to get answers for some of their problems. You can go through these questions and get blog ideas that can be relevant to your audience. Remember it’s all about offering some solutions to your audience.
3. Brainstorm with Friends or Business Partners or Colleagues
Brainstorming offers a great platform for diverse perspectives widened by the collective understanding of topical issues. It can help you discern and create themes for topics you’re passionate about that could compel your readers. You can make this a monthly thing for everyone concerned to plan ahead for the best results.
4. Random Discussions
Sometimes you may try too hard to get good blog post ideas from sitting in front of your computer for hours without an end when all you should really be doing is having more conversations with people over drinks, at the dinner table, and so on. These common topics people are always talking about are the exact same ones they want to learn more about and are likely to enjoy reading about.
5. Niche or Industry News
This tactic will work in many ways for you, it’ll show you’re up to speed with current issues that are relevant to your audience, and it will also get you the blog content you’re looking for. For instance, you can write about some new technology within your industry, developing trends, predictions for the next quarter, and such content. From this, you can actually get blog ideas to last you even a month!
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6. Feedback
As you may have realized by now, your audience is a primary source for your content. The important thing is to identify their insights and work on them. You may realize that asking them questions may be a little biased and therefore may not give you accurate results, it’s better to identify their frustrations or challenges and address them from that point. Now this will give you very relevant blog topic ideas.
7. Buzzsumo
This is a trending tool with the most popular blogs; it will show you what’s being shared most on social platforms. You just need to plug your topic into the tool and get a list of the most shared content within a certain topic. This will give you great resources and your only goal here will be to understand why this content is going viral and use that information to inspire your own blog topic ideas.
8. Get Personal
Talk about yourself. It may sound narcissistic, but people are always willing and looking forward to hearing about others’ experiences and generally about other people’s lives. So, sharing your experience with your audience is one quick way to generate an interesting blog idea. You can for instance:
· Write about what you do in a day as in your daily schedule
· How your morning routine affects your work output
· What you do differently that helps you succeed
· How you got into the industry and the skills that got you there and so on.
These can offer you several blog ideas to be enough for a few weeks or months.
9. Use a Survey
Ask your readers about something that they would want to see or learn; create a survey without necessarily overwhelming them by only focusing on the most important content. You can do this by making a list of questions that you’d like to feature in your survey. Create them in such a way that you’ll get your audience to share as much feedback as possible. You can use relevant incentives to motivate them into taking the survey and then in the end use this as your blog post ideas.
10. Create Complete Guides
Most manuals around the world end up in the bin; people tend to Google for instructions then read the provided manuals. Thus, within your niche, find out what they’re curious about and create a complete one-stop guide for them. Ensure to back up your guides with legit statistics from trusted sources and acknowledge them.
These skills could range from technology, crafts, photography, or basic survival skills; it all depends on your niche.
11. Invite a Relevant Guest
Guests can be refreshing at times; your audience might just appreciate something different. If you don’t have someone in mind that you can invite, you can post a call for willing writers or bloggers to submit their blog ideas, you would have killed two birds with one stone. You will get many blog ideas and still find someone with worthy content to share with your readers.
12. Review a Blog Post or a Book
Most people may lack the time or patience to go through an entire book or blog, some would appreciate a heads-up before they dive into such content, so you can make use of the strategy mentioned above to read some of this content and review it for your readers. The trick here is to review relevant content that they can resonate with.
13. Beginner Guides
Everyone starts from somewhere, and these are some of the most popular blog topic ideas, people are always looking for new skills. You can create simple 101 beginner guides for your readers on matters you’re sure are relevant to your blog. The same way you do a complete guide, this one also requires you to use authoritative infographics to guarantee your readers that they can trust your content.
14. Interviews
When you rub shoulders with experts, you’re considered one in no time. So, this gives you another blog idea and also, sets you apart from the other bloggers in your niche because of the professional valuable knowledge you’re offering. Set up interviews with experts in your industry; this doesn’t require you to sit down with them, draw some unique questions based on what your audience would be curious to know, and email them.
15. Blog About Productivity
This is an evergreen kind of content that will be useful to your readers no matter your niche or industry. It’s also very wide and therefore can be a great source of numerous blog ideas spread throughout time. This is because people are busier than ever and are constantly looking for how to do more with less time. As a consequence, you can give fresh tips or tricks to help people utilize their time better.
16. Upcoming Events
There’s always an upcoming event somewhere and if you look around your industry you just might find an event that you can blog about. Could be a meet and greet, a product launch, a book signing, or something that would be of interest to your readers. Just blog about it.
17. Create Lists
Lists are another very popular blog idea among bloggers. This is because people like quick analyses of lists of things or places in a straightforward and organized way. What you’re reading now is a list! Putting together a list of items within your industry is a guaranteed attraction for your blog. E.g. top ten holiday destinations and so on.
18. Infographics
Out in this content jungle people are always looking for a way to improve their blogs. If you can compile some accurate and relevant infographics about your industry, you’ll be a go-to source of information. You can use some appealing visuals for your infographics having in mind that visuals must always be incorporated into your blog content as mentioned above.
If you’re not good at creating such visuals you can get someone to do it for you because of the possibility that other bloggers will use your statistics for their own content, and they will require giving you the credit. This will be a great boost for your ranking and traffic.
19. Create a Series
Each industry has some topics that can’t be wrapped up in a single post even if it was made as a long-form type, they then must be broken down into a series. You can also create a monthly feature that can run on specific themes or topics. Thus, once you come up with such a feature it will be easier to get blog topic ideas.
20. Blog About a Customer Success Story
Every now and then you’ll meet a very happy reader or customer who will contact you to express satisfaction and appreciation in what you do. When it happens, engage them further and find out if they would like to be featured in your blog.
For a good impact of your blog, describe the reason or problem your reader or customer had, that led them to your blog and explain how this problem was resolved thanks to your blog. This blog idea will seriously boost your engagement rate.
21. What’s the Best Advice You’ve Ever Received?
Everyone that’s interested in your blog content would be interested in something that earned you success. Share the best advice you’ve ever been given and tell your readers how this changed your life or career. Whether it’s blogging advice or just business advice, sharing this wisdom with your readers is always a welcome blog idea.
22. Talk About Your Courses
Most people generally support brands that put their weight behind worthy causes because they’re naturally appealed to by the good in people. Therefore, sharing about your contribution to these communities can grow your readership. This can make for great blog ideas that can keep featuring every once in a while.
23. Controversy or Concern?
There is no industry to lack controversy. These make for rich blog topic ideas. Staying neutral or positive sounds like the easiest and safest bet but calling out brands or people may spark healthy conversations that may draw readers into it. However, it may bring you unpleasant consequences that could turn some people away. So, it’s at your own discretion, after all, most of these large and popular brands were built on controversy.
24. Share a Behind the Scene Content
As said earlier, people are naturally curious about how other people live. Thus, you can offer your audience a sneak peek of what goes on behind the scenes in your personal life outside of content creation.
25. Share Your Challenge and Videos or Images of Progress
Challenge yourself to do something spectacular and document it for your audience to keep track of. This will make for great blog ideas based on each new record you set and the challenges you face while trying to achieve it. It’s also a very inspiring type of content that will keep your audience glued and coming back to keep up with the progress.
Source: YouTube
26. Talk about Sports Within Your Niche
Fitness is never going to go away, and it makes for very useful blog post ideas. You can talk about sports that can boost skills within your niche. For instance, some photography or travel bloggers love to hike. Explain how this can boost their photo-taking skills.
27. Compile a List of Top Social Media Posts by Industry Pros
Some of the best blog post ideas come free of charge from social media. Some great people share some amazing nuggets of wisdom on their social media pages, you can bookmark the ones that strike and sit in longer with you and later compile them to create a wisdom-filled post.
28. Tell Your Readers How to Improve Their Health at Work
You spend a lot of your time at work, and most of your readers too. Most people, in general, spend a good chunk of their day staring at screens, and in the long run, this unavoidable sitting habit can be detrimental to someone’s health. In your blog, you can suggest them ways they can engage in healthy activities during their breaks to give their backs and eyes some exercise. Make sure your content is backed by scientific research.
29. Ask Me Anything
This is one of the most liked blog topic ideas for blog readers on the internet. You can invite your readers to send in questions that they’re curious about, and then make it as real or as raw as possible. Don’t try to sound like a perfect human being, people love real grounded content that they can relate to.
30. Real Everyday Struggles of Running Your Business
Some brands love to portray a glamorous lifestyle and like to show how smooth and organized their businesses are, but by now everyone knows that true success doesn’t come easy. And again, people are tired of hearing success stories, what they want to hear is how you failed, and how you got back up. This realism makes for great blog ideas, the very kind that people need for inspiration.
31. What Are Your Favorite Apps, Tools, or Websites?
The competition out there is stiff, and every businessperson out there is looking for ways to have an advantage over their competitors. Share with your readers the tools that give you that edge. Share about the apps or sites or strategies that help you ace your game. You’ll make very happy many readers.
32. Give Tips on Networking within Your Industry
The millennials use up so much of their time on the internet and this has seriously affected their ability to develop healthy social and interpersonal skills. Thus, when it comes to actual interactions, they find themselves unable to mingle freely with others and this eventually affects their professional connections. You can create a number of such blog post ideas offering them tips on how to develop these important skills.
33. Create a Glossary
Most people have a tendency to leave your page entirely after they realize they can’t understand some terms. Alienating your readers is not something you want. A glossary will give them a chance to feel like they’re becoming experts in the niche and they will want to come back for more of this feeling.
34. List Your Top Influencers
Influencers would be fellow bloggers, everyday people, journalists, consultants, and so on. They are people that command a great following and are popularly used to help boost a brand’s credibility. They are always defined by their various niches. You can use some free internet tools available to identify the ones in your industry and list them down for your readers. This will be great for your blog traffic.
35. How to Relax from Overworking
This is one valuable blog idea thanks to the obvious reason that most people overwork in a bid to find a balance between their personal life and professional life. Others even add a side hustle to this blend and that leaves no time for relaxation. You can share the most practical relaxation tips with your readers; you can research such ideas that may range from massages to cookery or even listening to music.
36. Which Technological Advancements Are Shaping Your Industry’s Future?
Magnificent stuff is happening in the tech world every passing day and the impact cannot go unnoticed. So, which technological developments are shaking up things in your industry and how are they changing things? Put your thoughts together and create a few predictions that your readers may be interested in.
37. Give Backstories
People love to hear about the failures, frustrations, and disappointments that successful people had to go through before they rose to fame. You can look through a few of the most successful and relevant people in your industry and do a background check of their previous life and share these backstories with your readers. This will make for great blog content and at the same time motivate them to get through tough times.
38. Highlight Your Loyal Readers/Customers
If you did something right and earned yourself a passionate loyal customer or reader that always responds to your CTA, then shine the spotlight on them. These customer-centric blog ideas always create a win-win situation for you and your audience. Such a move would increase engagement and inspire your customers to do more, they would know that you notice and value them.
39. What Books Can They Read?
What books have you been reading, that you think might be of interest to your readers? This is not about book reviews, this is just hinting to your readers about amazing books that have been insightful to you and that you feel will inspire them. They could be within your niche or general things that can apply to any human.
40. List of People That You Look Up to in Your Field
You probably (or must) have a few people that you feel are always making the right moves. It could be within your industry or even out of your industry, but their impact can be applied in any field. Share the lessons that you take home from their life experience, etc. This will make for inspirational blog post ideas.
41. Create a Dos and Don’ts Blog
Every growth journey, whether personal or business, is littered with obstacles that may not be obvious to many. You can highlight some of these obstacles and the dos and don’ts in dealing with them. Detail all the possible risks and opportunities that they may need to know. These heads-up type of blog ideas are always appreciated by readers who are keen not to sabotage their career growth.
42. Draft Them Emails
You have a knack for writing; most of your readers may not have it. Do them a favor and draft some templates for the common emails you’re always sending. This will be very handy since emails are today’s primary means of official communication. You probably send a few emails daily. Compile resourceful templates for them and then post and wait for endless thank you note in your comments.
Source: YouTube
43. Share Your Best Podcasts
Podcasts are massively growing in popularity, it’s the latest easy medium for people and professionals alike to learn new things while either driving somewhere, cooking, or even working out. They’re very useful because they can listen while doing something else.
So, which ones are you listening to now? Pick several, especially the ones that would be valuable to your readers, and say something about them without spoiling them. This would be another source of powerful blog post ideas.
44. Is There Anything You’d Like to Change in Your Industry?
Throughout your career, there must have been things that you wish were different. You’ve probably wished that you somehow would be able to improve on some of them, what ideas did you have? Float them to your readers and see what they think, you never know just what you might be able to achieve beyond getting great blog ideas.
45. Tough Times Don’t Last
The whole world is going through tough times, in 2020, Covid19 was wreaking havoc all over and people were feeling the effects of struggling economic times. People are going through fatigue, stress, and depression due to immense losses being experienced all over. Gather some realistic tips and advice in a series of blog topic ideas that would help your readers on a personal level, business level, and even generally as humans.
46. Be Humble, Be Patient
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, these skills are of absolute must-have for anyone. We live in times of instant messaging, instant food, and instant everything, well almost. And what this instant gratification is doing is raising a generation of impatient people, who consider it’s their right to get things done when they want. Enlighten your readers on the benefits of patience, and how it’s related to humility, and guide them using facts on how these skills can be acquired and how they’re useful for their personal and career growth.
47. Break Large Tasks into Smaller Chunks
A million miles starts with one step. When handling massive tasks, it becomes easier and more manageable if you break them into more achievable and less stressful steps. Talk about this to your readers and give them possible guidelines through a feature or series of blog post ideas showing how they might use to break down their targets into easier quick ones.
48. Unplug from All Things Internet
The internet is extremely useful. However it’s often abused through extreme use that leads to addiction, and this is enabled by things like social media. Social media can cause great anxiety and lead to depression.
And since it’s hard to separate social media from the internet, then offer them advice on how they can keep away from the internet for a couple of hours a day or every other day.
Create a series of blog ideas highlighting some activities that would help them stay away from the screens while utilizing their time in healthier and fun activities.
49. Therapy Is for Everyone
Most people think therapy is for mentally unstable people, however, therapy is great for everybody whether going through emotionally disturbing times or not. The blog post ideas on this topic can discuss the benefits of therapy in relation to your readers’ profession, personal relationships, and so forth.
50. Best Video and Photo Editing Apps for Your Smartphones
Most smartphone users love selfies, and there is a myriad of photo editing apps out there with millions of filters. You can research the best based on experts as well as the ones you’ve tried and make a neat list of reviews that would be of great help to your audience.
Tips on Creating Brilliant Content That Will Earn You Traffic
As you beat yourself up with questions on how to come up with blog ideas, you must not forget that they can’t ride on their own; they need some tweaking in order to gain the engagement and earn you the traffic that you’re looking for. Here are some tips that can push your content far:
a. Create Evergreen Content
This is a blog topic that will remain relevant to your customers or readers at any given time. It’s a solution to an ongoing problem. Give them content that will be relevant even five years from today. For instance, “how to boil an egg” or “how to lose weight” are simple examples of evergreen blog topic ideas.
These kinds of content are very important because it means you’ll not have to keep updating them often and this will save you time. They are a great source of organic traffic because they will always be relevant. So, as you consider good blog topic ideas, pick evergreen ones.
b. Catchy Headlines
Make your readers want to hear more. That’s the whole statement. Think of your headline as a quick opportunity to make a quick pitch to someone that’s so difficult to meet, your two seconds must leave them curious to hear more. Consequently, if you do it right then you earn an appointment, if you get your headline right, your readers will want more. Thus, your headline must:
· Offer a hint of what your whole blog is about
· Incite the reader to skim the first paragraphs.
It needs to be magnetic. This can be achieved by the use of emotional words; people are always drawn by emotions.
c. Give a Compelling Lead
Your first sentence or paragraph must compel your visitors to read the next one and draw them in as much as you can. Don’t take ages to land the plane. Ensure there are plenty of build-ups to make the readers want to know more about the blog topic ideas you’re presenting to them until they get to the understanding point.
Use the strategies discussed above to understand your readers’ issues and base these compelling leads straight on their solutions.
d. Use Subheads
You need subheads for three reasons:
i. They have a more visually appealing look on your page
ii. They help your reader head straight to the important part if they don’t have time to read the whole article
iii. They boost SEO
Using long never-ending pages is a complete turnoff to most readers. Break them with graphics or use subheads or both. Subheads are also very useful for the reader who wants to jump back to a specific point that they read previously. Using descriptive words and phrases in your subheads will most likely boost SEO.
e. Engaging and Informative Body
This is the meat and potatoes of your blog topic ideas. It varies in countless ways, but if you want to establish your authority then your content MUST be able to do it. If you’re trying to build a personal relationship with your audience, then the blog must be written in a manner to achieve exactly that. The trick is in your goal, what do you want to achieve with your content?
If you explain your blog topic idea properly, Google will pick up what you’re trying to say and rank you accordingly, even without the robotic keywords.
f. Visual Appeal
Graphics are important in illustrating different ideas within your blog, they also do a good job of breaking the text as mentioned above. Visuals are great for promoting your content on social media. And as you may be aware, Google tracks the time spent on your blog pages. Thus, relevant, fun, and excellent graphics, color scheme, and typography encourage your readers to stick around longer. And you need that.
Visuals are the first vector of sales.
Use Professional Styled Stock Photography to Promote Your Business.
g. Influential Call to Action
Almost every article written on the internet must have some type of call-to-action. The action you want your visitors to take is dependent on the goal and purpose of your content. Some want it to be shared, others want a comment, a subscription, or learn more, and others might want a sale. It varies hugely. Decide on what CTA you want your readers to take, just one per blog topic idea. And then make it clear and encouraging to your readers to make the move.
h. Use Relevant Internal Links
One main goal of a blogger is to have his readers stick around longer. Advertise your own content within your blog by linking this content to your newer or latest content. Internal links are also good for SEO since they increase the number of times and pages per visit each time a visitor is on your site. So, for effectiveness ensure that the link is as relevant as possible to the person reading your blog topic ideas.
i. Use Bullet Points
People have a tendency to just skim through content before they decide whether to read or not because when they get to your page, there’s usually specific information they’re looking for. This requires you to highlight all the valuable information to help them quickly realize that your post is just what they were looking for.
So, besides the subheadings mentioned above, bullets are another key element that helps spoon-feed your page visitors making them happy and willing to come back for more.
j. An Elaborate Metadata Description
If you’re new to blogging or have been blogging without necessarily having a marketing team, then coming up with a meta description may be a task. The meta description appears underneath your headline on a search result page and summarizes your blog posts’ content. It usually gives a searcher the succinct details of your blog post ideas. So, you need it to work properly, here is how to do that:
· Use keywords that are relevant to your blog topic ideas
· Keep the characters under 160
· Don’t overdo it with extra descriptive words
· Provide a brief description of the things that’ll benefit the reader
· Don’t use promotional information
Did you get any new ideas? There’s no perfect idea but all the above blogs’ post ideas are better than no idea. With the above bonus content strategies coupled with the elements of an effective blog given here, you’re well on your way to increased blog traffic with a very engaged target audience. It’s also obvious that your audiences are the primary source of great and relevant blog ideas. Thus, go ahead and get blogging.
