How to Generate Blog Topic Ideas

“Hi, Na’im. My client sent his blog to me to check what other content I could write, but I was short of ideas. It seems they have written every topic that is related to their service. How can I generate new topics for the blog?” It is normal to feel intimidated by the quality of content on your client’s blog and feel you cannot help them further. Other times, you may feel like there is nothing new your client hasn’t written. Hence, here are simple ways to generate blog topic ideas.

Determine the purpose of your blog

As a blogger or service provider, you must have a clear picture of what your blog stands for, which is the first step in narrowing down what to put down on the blog. Ask yourself why you have the blog, what part of your business the blog serves, and what form of content you want to put out there. As a freelancer, you may not have answers to most of these questions. But ask your client what they plan to achieve with the blog. The purpose of a blog falls into one of the following categories

Educating users about your serving
Driving conversions
Attracting leads
Generating leads

By understanding the purpose of the lead, it becomes easier to know what form of content best suit your blog. For Instance, 31% of B2B and B2C content marketers reported blog posts as the highest content form to increase brand awareness, according to CMI. Additionally, B2B marketers who use blogs get 67% more leads than others, according to HubSpot.

Keep a note to generate a blog topic idea.

Inspiration may come anywhere; while praying or when using the toilet. You don’t want to lose a blog post idea your mind generates subconsciously. Hence, it is pertinent to keep a note. An ideas file to keep thoughts, questions, opinions, and prompts is essential for writers and bloggers. Therefore, when you need a blog idea, you can check your note to see what will fit your bog. Use Notion as a tool to keep a file, and it comes with free content calendar template to help.

Learn from others to generate blog topic ideas

Exposing yourself to expert opinions and numerous content in your niche is a cheat to finding numerous content ideas. These ideas will be of immense help

You can use a feed reader, like Feedly to check what your favourite blogs published
You can set up a calendar and dedicate blog reading time to generate blog topic ideas
Sign up for newsletters of your favourite blogs and read all their content

There is no harm in getting ideas from people who have gotten it right and have a budget to spend on research as far as you are not copying and pasting. Hence, you should know how to rewrite to make your copy more unique, better, and rich.

Your audience can help to generate blog topic ideas

Content ideas can come from your community by asking what they would like you to feature on your blog via email or tweet, or even in a physical space. Apart from getting ideas, their participation in generating blog topic ideas is key to engagement and loyalty, a recipe for many business successes. By asking your readers what they would like to learn, you will also get insights into their pain points, desire, and interest.

Ask the web through targeted searches

Let’s face it; you are not the first to search for how to generate ideas for writing, with many already recording huge successes. The first step is to search for the form of questions people in your industry are searching for on platforms like Quora and Reddit. You can also use Twitter and Nairaland to see what people discuss daily.

Explain existing blog posts in detail

Check your blog analytics history to find the most engaged, trendy, and shared posts of all time. This is a great opportunity, especially if there is still much traffic to them after many months of publishing. So since you know the content is needed, the best is to expand them through follow-ups or repurpose the content by adding new insights. That’s a great SEO tactic to get more people to read the post. The beauty of it is the easiness of doing as you have done most of the job before. You can do content editing with AHref to update the best posts.

Write on trending topics

You can find what is trending online and write about them. Numerous tools are available to discover trending topics to discover what pique people’s interest. By leveraging this trending information, you will craft excellent blog posts that will increase your traffic, awareness, and credibility. The platforms include

Google Trends – You can figure out the trending topics over a specific period.
BuzzSumo – You can search a keyword to find out the blog and website that rank for it and what they’re writing about.
AnswerThePublic.com – This is a perfect place to get hundreds of blog post ideas. When you enter any term, you will find a mountain of synonyms and related keywords that people search in real-time.
Question DB – This is similar to AnswerThePublic.com, where you get numerous topic ideas when you insert a keyword.
Exploding Topics – You can discover numerous niche ideas before they become well-known in mainstream trends.

Depending on your niche, crafting a story about your products and processes is a great idea. Additionally, you can share stories of other content on your blog. Irrespective of your niche, there is always a story to tell about your process, the hurdles, and the wins. Tell us about

What old belief have you shed?
What are the new things you learn?
If you could do one thing differently from how you started, what would it be?

These stories give the human side of your content for people to relate with you better. A behind-the-scenes story is related to your brand story and could increase loyalty.

Repurpose your content into a guide

A blog post that engages and appeals to the readers to consume more content on your blog is a gem. Therefore, internal linking to other existing posts is good for SEO and a way to appeal to make your readers read more. You can link related blog posts together and let them flow in a manner that can serve as a mini-guide so that each rubs value on others. To make this work, you should add an introduction, a conclusion and update the links to each post. Yippy! You now have a mini-guide that will make people glue to your website.

Get ideas from experts and creators

Sometimes, it looks like you have done everything, and there is no other way. Borrow the ideas of other creators. Interview industrial experts in your niche. We are sure you will generate many ideas from there. However, the challenge is getting the right question to ask them beyond telling you their personal stories. Ask them disturbing and controversial questions in your industry to generate blog topic ideas.

Do competitor analysis to find content gaps

Keyword research is a sure way to get topic ideas, and anything working for your competitor will work for you. The keywords they rank for and their top-performing articles will give you a headway of what to write. You can use Ahref for practical content gap analysis.

The primary point is to get keywords with minimal keyword difficulty and high search volume to create unique content and muscle others for ranking. Check your competitors’ posts and see how you can craft better content with new information, data, or infographic. Other tools are Ubbersuggest, Semrush, Google keyword analyzer, and many others.

How to generate blog topic ideas through YouTube videos

As much as you can use YouTube as a search engine to get information on many niches, you can use it to generate blog post ideas, including the information needed to write the post. Find the most popular videos from your niche – guides, trend videos, news videos, how-to videos, and others. Content with numerous engagements, views, and comments could do well for your blog

Blog topic ideas generator through your FAQ Sections

You have a frequently asked questions section on your website because these are everyday questions visitors ask, including new customers. Your FAQ section guarantees content topics by repurposing the issues as other forms of content. You can turn some questions into listicles, user-guide, e-books, and others.

Blog topic ideas generator through your competitor’s FAQ sections

Your website may have limited FAQs; when you comb Google enough, you will get numerous questions prospects and customers on your competitor’s blogs are asking. These are ideal ways to turn those questions into blogs and explain them better for visitors to appreciate your knowledge and eventually stick with you.

Interview your coworkers

Your co-workers are living bags of ideas since they interact with different parts of your business differently. For instance, your customer service knows what exactly trouble the customer and them, your sales team knows what should be added to make your offer irresistible, and your executives know why they take specific steps in line with the goals and objectives of the business.

By interviewing them, you can publish their responses as interviews, blog posts, or just pick insights and publish them as featured posts. Apart from getting insight into content, interviewing them is an excellent idea to know more about your service.

Search URLs in the AdWords Keyword Planner

Many content marketers and SEO specialists have hacked the basics of the AdWords Keyword Planner –for looking up search volumes, browsing ad groups to get keyword ideas, and others. However, you can also use it to get keyword ideas from existing data. You can paste any existing content into the URL field to see keyword ideas based on what you’ve already written about and published.

Generate blog post ideas with headline analyzers and generators

I bet you thought headline generators are there to get the best headlines only – how far from the truth that can be. If you have half information on what you want to write, for instance, how to beat a plagiarism checker, you can put that title on a headline generator to create topics and play around to get more. By bringing different headlines, you may discover new insights or angles the topic should follow. Some headline generators include

Alternatively, browse Google for headline generators and analyzers to see more options.

From here, generating blog post ideas become easier, one of the recipes for writer’s block. However, I can’t say you won’t have block again, but these recipes, when used well, will cover you for years. Have we exhausted our list, or is there any other way you generate a topic for your blog? Share with us in the comment section.