How to Get Content Ideas for Your Blog
One of the challenges of running a successful blog is being able to consistently come up with content ideas. In the beginning, bloggers often find they have a lot to say. After a few months however, the ideas that were on the top of their minds are all out on the web already. Now you still have to come up with content – Every day, every week or at least several times a month.
Where do you go for more content ideas? How can you find inspiration when the ideas just aren’t flowing?
Other People’s Blogs
Subscribe to the RSS feeds of other prominent blogs in your industry. Look at what other people are talking about and see if you can piggy back off their ideas, or add your own unique spin.
For example, let’s say you write a blog about blogging. You’re subscribed to other blogs on the same topic. You’re having trouble coming up with ideas, so you decide to look through some of the other blogs for inspiration.
You find someone talking about little known strategies to get traffic to blogs or how blogging gets you links. While you might not agree with the strategies themselves, you can take this topic and add your own tactics and publish something along the same vein on your own site.
Forums: Trends and Problems
Another great place to look is internet forums. Internet forums are a fantastic place to spot trends and problems.
For instance, if you go on an internet marketing forum and see tons and tons of people suddenly talking about marketing to offline small businesses, you’ll know that that’s a hot trend right now. You can do a series of articles around that trend to capitalize on it.
Forums are also fantastic places to spot problems people are having. For example, after the Google Penguin update you might notice a lot of webmasters are struggling to get their rankings back. That’s a fantastic opportunity for you to create a series of articles geared for people who’ve been hit by Penguin on how to get their sites back in the search engines.
No matter what industry your blog is in, forums can be a fantastic way to tap inside the mind of your audience.
Stay Up to Date on Current Events
Current events are very good fodder for your blog. Stay abreast of current events both in the world at large and in your industry specifically.
For example, one current event for businesses in the United States might be how the 2014 healthcare laws would affect businesses. Many business owners simply don’t know what is and isn’t required of them. Does it apply to internet companies? Of what size?
Current events apply on a micro scale as well. For example, let’s say you run a website about fishing. A new kind of fishing rod was just released. Naturally, it’s probably a good idea to do a run-through of the rod or do a review.
Stay up to date on current events in the world and in your industry. They’re both fantastic places to look for ideas.
Go Offline: Books and Magazines
Sometimes the internet just seems like a giant pool of people who just trade ideas off one another. While getting ideas for blog posts online is great, sometimes the most innovative ideas you’ll find aren’t online at all. They’re in books and magazines.
Pick up a few old books on your subject. While online articles are often researched by reading other online articles, books are researched differently. They’re often researched with publications, clinical research and real face to face sources. The quality of information is very different. The ideas in old books might be outdated, but they can still serve and inspiration to come up with new ideas today.
Magazines are similar. Editors and journalists who work in a newsroom environment are under much stricter publication guidelines than someone running a blog from their bedroom. Magazines often have very clever and well researched ideas.
Carry a Notebook With You
Finally, always carry a notebook with you. You’ll find that often you’ll come up with your best ideas seemingly out of nowhere. It might be on the train, it might be on a walk, it might be while you’re taking a bath. Carry a notebook with you at all times so you can jot down these blog writing ideas as you come up with them.
Author Bio – This is a guest post by Chris Barber who works for Blog Hands. They believe in providing a blog writing service that takes the weight of blogging off their clients’ shoulders and meeting a level of quality that goes beyond writing a blog post. Make sure you check out their latest blog post on Google recommends blogging.
