Coming up with fresh blog posts and ideas is critical to keep a blog up to date and engaging. However, it can be a daunting task.
For most bloggers and content creators, it is easier to churn out ideas in the beginning. Slowly, as topics get exhausted, generating new and unique ideas becomes harder.
Sometimes, it can just be a writer’s block. Taking a few breaks and refreshing your mind for the next round can help you get over it.
However, the process goes on and on. Your profession is to keep turning up with new post types, new content, and a fresh mix of keywords while keeping things niche relevant. It becomes narrower and narrower in scope as things progress.
You have to expand your writing and content skills further from your existing abilities. Also, if you are always focused on things that “you” want to write about, your operations will come to a grinding halt in no time.
Readers nowadays look for specific solutions to specific problems.
You are there to provide end-user satisfaction. You must be doing that.
Pros,who come up with new ideas daily keep these thingsin mind. Therefore, they consistently expand their horizons. They stay on topof trends and tweak them to come up with unique and fresh ideas.
You can also use a mixed bag of tools andstrategies to develop stellar content regularly.
Here are 15 Places to Get Blog Post Ideas When You areStuck
#1 Portent
If you want instantly attractive post ideas, then Portent Idea Generator is an ideal choice. It works great if you want titles with a dash of humor and click-baits. It is one of the easiest ways to find catchy post titles.
To get the best results on Portent:
- You should only write propernouns in capital
- Revise/refresh the resultsmultiple times
- Use the singular version ofyour keyword
#2 AnswerThePublic
It is a creative tool for finding uniquevariations for any search term. You can find keywords, headlines and blogtopics relevant to your niche. The unique thing about this tool is that it isvisual.
Once you enter your keyword, it takes twominutes for the images to load. These images are divided into categories andhave ideas embedded in them. The categories include:
- Questions (Like “What are the Trends in SEO for 2019?”)
- Prepositions (Like “What is SEO any good for?”)
- Comparisons
- Alphabetical &
- Related topics
With such diversification, you get aplethora of ideas to choose from around a single keyword. This way, you canquickly come up with new and unique insights on the go.
#3 Quora
If you are new to Quora, then you have beenmissing out on the largest database of all possible answers on the Internet. Itis filled with an endless array of questions and answers. Furthermore, you getoriginal and unique ideas directly from people in the form of answers.
You can proceed by posting doubts andquestions that come to your mind. People will see these questions and startreplying. Also, you can use the read option. It allows you to read and browsethrough relevant questions and answers in the niche of your choice.
Such large volumes of answers allow you toexpand your opinions and come up with compelling ideas for blogs and socialmedia posts. Furthermore, your content will already be toned with the targetaudience as it intercepts with what they already think.
Also, you can follow a question if itregarding a particular topic that’s relevant to you. You will receivenotifications whenever someone replies to it. All in all, the answers you getare descriptive and help you in generating numerous post ideas.
You can also find ideas for your blog byvisiting Quora Sitemaps. You cancheck out the most-viewed questions and answers in a particular niche and carryon your research.
#4 YouTube
YouTube is undoubtedly an ocean of content.However, you have to smartly scour through relevant videos to come up withawesome blog post ideas.
For instance, if you’re looking for topics in the eCommerce niche, you can check out videos by top companies like Amazon and eBay. Also, you can look at influencers who are garnering top views in the eCommerce niche. Afterward, you can check out these videos in detail and come up with individual blog posts.
Sometimes, the videos are so unique thatyou can convert a video into written content and manufacture a unique blogpost.
Moreover, with ready to embed videos, the richmedia quotient of your post is high, right from the start.
Different kinds of videos can lead to different content pieces. For instance, advisory blogs can convert into blog posts with advisable solutions. A video about gifting ideas can be converted into a listicle.
The comments generated on a video also contain valuable insights, doubts, and questions related to the video. You can search through these comments to come up with ideas. You can later reply to them with the link embedded and clear those doubts.
#5 Blog Comments
The comments readers leave on your blog posts are a goldmine of new and unique ideas. You should regularly scan your blog comments and take not of various doubts, questions, and suggestions that you readers have left.
You can club multiple doubts together and create a new problem-solving post. Afterward, you can publish and share it directly with your readers.
You can take random suggestions thatreaders leave in the comments sections. These suggestions can be transformedinto entirely new blog posts. Similarly, if a related topic is enquired about,then it can be clubbed together, for instance, in an alternatives post.
Overall, blog comments are one of the best ways to keep generating new post ideas for your blog. If you already have a good reader base, engagement on your posts must be healthy. You have to start analyzing this engagement and then never worry about new ideas!
#6 Spying on your Competition
A competitor is someone who is working inthe same niche as you are. Therefore, keeping tabs on the type of content theyproduce and the feedback they generate on the same is essential.
However, spying on your competition doesn’t mean stealing their blog ideas. You should use them for inspiration and always come up with ideas of your own. Furthermore, here are some tools you can use to identify and track your competition:
- BuzzSumo
- Ahrefs
- SEMrush
There are even more various tools in the market that you can explore. Once you have identified them, you can analyze their content.
You can create highly engaging reply andopinion posts and share it with frequent readers. For instance, if you see apost about “How Affiliate Marketing is Slowly Dying Out”. You can create a postlike “Strategies to Radically Modify Affiliate Marketing in 2019”.
Similarly, you can look at the comments onthese blogs and generate another set of unique ideas regularly.
#7 Ask Your Readers
Publishers and readers have never been moreconnected. Clearly, social media is to blame. Most readers like staying intouch with publications and blogs they follow. Therefore, they always connectto their social handles like Facebook pages, Instagram and twitter handlesand even Whatsapp groups.
I believe that such social circles provide the best metrics for analyzing trends and patterns. You get a real-time track on what readers are thinking. They post their doubts, opinions, and suggestions all over social media. You can check them out and create new ideas.
However,the best way to use social media is to interact with readers yourselves and askthem directly.
You can use simple features like Facebook Search. Use it to find groups and pages relevant to your niche. You can scour through these pages and groups and find out people’s problems. Afterward, you can create blog posts that are solutions to these problems!
Your audience is the best source of inspiration for new ideas. Another way you can directly ask them is through Google Forms. You can create them for free. Just put in all the questions you want answering. Afterward, you can send out emails or links to your readers, receive answers, map them and come up with unique ideas.
However, don’t overwhelm your readers withtoo many or complex questions. Keep it simple.
- Ask simple yes/no questions
- Always give multiple choices asanswers to generate a quick response
- Let them identify problems, andyou become a solutions provider
- Don’t ask double-barreledquestions (questions that contain two or more underlying issues: they arecomplex and make answering tedious)
- Don’t use absolutes like “Doyou always” or “How many times exactly”. They confuse the readers
- Offer the right incentives
- Set a deadline
- Don’t use unclear language
- Don’t use too many jargons
- Don’t ask too many questions
- Filter your email listsaccording to the theme of the survey.
- Mildly advertise the surveys onFacebook to get response boost
- Embed these surveys in thankyou or confirmation pages
- Create a blog post around thesurvey to promote it.
#8 Analyse previous blog posts
If you don’t already analyze your blog posts, then you’re committing a big mistake. Old content needs updates and maintenance from time to time. Some of your old content may not even be relevant due to technological or other advancements.
Therefore, you can create new posts on the go as updates and upgraded information on the previous one. Furthermore, you can interlink these posts to improve optimization.
For instance, content marketing strategiesin 2015 are deviant from those in 2019. Hence, you can create posts derivedfrom 2015 and relevant in 2019 like:
- Content Marketing Strategiesstill dominant in 2019
- What Content Strategies toDiscard in 2019
- How Content Marketing hasevolved since 2015
Similarly, more topics and posts can beexplored to generate numerous ideas and posts.
#9 Expand your Listicles
A great way to add content and interlinking is by creating detailed posts from Listicles. These articles contain many ideas around a specific topic. You can pick on of these ideas and expand it into an altogether new post.
Interlinking both posts with increase therelevance of both blog posts, enhance engagement and keep your blog flowingwith content. For instance, if you have a post like “Top 20 Tools to Spyon Your Competition”, then you can create a post about each tool and have21 individual posts in the end.
This strategy is relatively simple andworks every time!
#10 Improve poor blogs by others
Some people come with solid blog postideas. However, they don’t land high on the content and thus end up publishingpoor blog posts online.
You can see this as an opportunity if thesepoor blogs are relevant to your niche. You can tap and look for such blogposts.
Then you use whatever research is availableto start developing content. Then, you make sure to add value and create acreative piece that delivers far more value than the more mediocre post.
This way, you generate new blog post ideasalong with increasing your credibility among readers. It happens because youdelivered actionable content while others didn’t care to do so. You applied theeffort to solve the information gap.
Google also recognizes such efforts now with its semantic indexing and ranks your content better.
#11 Amazon Look Inside
It is another unique strategy I have pickedup while finding ways to generate new blog ideas. It is incredibly simple tocrack.
For instance, let us say you are lookingfor ideas around the subject of Digital Marketing in 2019. First, head over toamazon.com. Then search the idea.
Search any book you like from the searchresults. However, look for results that the option “Look Inside”.
Make sure that the title you look into has the right balance of positive and negative reviews. After you have finalized the book, click on the book cover to preview it.
Great! Now you are there. Starting from thetable of contents, you can start jotting down one new idea from another.
It is a fairly simple process. You canrepeat it umpteen times with any kind topic across any niche.
#12 Slideshare
Slideshare has gained massive popularity inrecent years in the domain of delivering relevant content. Furthermore, you getexcellent rich media to include in your posts.
You can start by going to the “mostpopular” pages. Here you get trending content across categories. Slidesharesthat have the option of embedding are great for including in your blog posts.You can create a detailed post around the theme and embed the corresponding PPTto enhance the content.
#13 Twitter
Twitter generates hundreds of posts andideas across all niches in a matter of minutes. These trending topics, hashtagspopular retweets can be used to create new and enticing blog ideas instantly.
Moreover, using hashtags and trendingcontent to come up with ideas allows you to create posts that are click-worthyand in line with what people are reading.
For instance, you can search the hashtag #digitalmarketing.After hitting search, some fresh posts pop up like:
- 50 Social Media Content Ideas
- Digital PR from 1999-2019
- How to get the most from yourdigital marketing team
You can go through these pieces of contentand come up with unique ideas for your blog posts.
#14 Simple Google Search
Have you noticed something interesting aboutrandom Google searches? As soon as you start typing in, suggestions crop up inthe drop-down menu.
This strategy couldn’t be any simpler. Youtype in the relevant words like above. As you can see from the image, numerousunique ideas pop up. You can add your thinking and planning to ideas and comeup with exciting ideas. For instance, you can create a post about “Top20 Digital Marketing Business Name Ideas”.
#15 Reddit
If you are looking for ideas highlyspecific to your niche, then look no further than Reddit. It is an old platformand topples any other platform on the Internet when it comes to the sheer sizeand range of content available.
However, if you are relatively new toReddit, finding the right places for content ideas can take some effort.
First and foremost, you can head to thesubreddit category of your liking and start exploring. You can also check outthe “interesting” category to explore popular threads and questions.Now, as the research begins, new ideas for blog posts start cropping up.
All the methods and strategies discussedabove help you in generating worthwhile blog post ideas. However, your power of observation should bepolished and efficient. When you observe, ideas can pop up at the strangest ofplaces. You can derive insights reading magazines at a coffee house onvacation!
Good writers and content creators are not perfect people. They can generate powerful ideas on the go.
However, it is safe to say that they also need inspiration and guidance to keep churning out stellar content. Therefore, use your resources efficiently. Be observant, patient and creative to stay on top of your content plans.
