5 WAYS TO COME UP WITH IDEAS FOR BLOG POSTS
If you're creating new content on a regular basis then unfortunately, writer's block is bound to happen.
I wanted to do a video on this, because while a lot of videos and articles on this topic give you good starting points, they don't actually show you how.
I’m gonna' show you how.
Searching for new content ideas may seem like a really time-consuming process. I mean, you’re adding extra hours onto what is a really long process already.
But it’s actually possible to generate new content ideas in just 15 minutes or less. And even better than that, there are plenty of different ways you can do it.
#1 | THE WEB
And I’ve caught you out here because I don’t actually mean the world wide web. I mean an actual web, like a spider’s web.
You want to use this web technique to connect different topics together.
It’s a fairly simple context. You start with one or two main ideas, then draw lines connecting those ideas to related sub-ideas which you think of.
Then you’ll branch out from those sub-ideas and continue the process, following what you think is working well, until you find a strong topic you can turn into a blog post.
So for instance, you might start off with a topic like digital marketing and branch out into:
- SEO
- Content marketing
- Social media
Then from content marketing you might draw lines to topics like:
- Newsletter
- Blog posts
And from there you might come up with, oh, I don’t know, "5 ways to create blog post ideas". You get what I’m saying!
#2 | LOOK AT YOUR COMPETITION
If you don’t like the web idea, taking a look at your competition is a great option.
Now when I say your competition I just really mean a list of people who are in a similar industry to you.
You should have a list of these on social media (or just in the back of your mind), so check out their blogs and social channels and look at what they’ve been posting.
If you want to get a little more in depth, you can cross reference their topics with yours. Are they covering some topics that you’ve missed out?
You can used a tool called Buzzsumo to sort a competitor’s posts in terms of popularity.
Take a look at these and maybe see what you could cover more in depth.
Now you definitely don’t want to copy here. You just want to take inspiration from what they’ve done. Who knows - you could even collaborate on something together.
#3 | UPDATE YOUR OWN CONTENT
This will save you SO much time AND saves you the difficulty of coming up with new ideas.
So go through your blog archives and see what you can find. I wouldn’t recommend you just repost an old article, but there a few things you can do here:
- Update an old blog post and reschedule it.
- Write a sequel if you’ve only covered part of a topic.
- Add a new perspective
- Check in with an old blog post you wrote. So if you made some predictions, did they come true?
#4 | LOOK AT TRENDING TOPICS
If you already have a list of go-to sources, you can start looking at those in less than a minute. If not, it’s a good idea to make a one-time investment.
Create lists on social media or use Feedly to organise some websites. Any sources of content that could provide valuable inspiration to your content creation process.
Then go through the topics and see what’s new - does that give you an idea?
#5 | GO TO YOUR SUPPORT NETWORK
You can always rely on the people you know in your network.
Reach out to the people you know online. Talk to them about things. Join in with Twitter chats. This will give you a broader perspective of how people think and ideas you could potentially develop.
And if you have a big enough audience, just ask them what topics they’d like you to cover. You’d be surprised how many responses you’ll get.
Some of these options will work better for you than others. Some may not work at all. But if you try all of these methods for just 15 minutes, you’ll have at least one solid new idea to work with.
Which of these tips will you try first when you're working on idea generation? Let me know the comments.
Remember to keep coming up with great ideas so you can get one step closer to a breakthrough.
