Content marketing is one of the largest components of making a brand work. This includes all posts on social media channels as well as blog posts. The most successful brands have a system that works for them to keep their audience engaged—it is a very well thought out strategy. When this is done correctly, the business will never be scrambling last minute to come up with a topic for a blog post. These are just some of the ways that will help a brand to come up with ideas for blog posts.
Talk to Your Readers/Customers
In the end, everything is done to please them and keep them engaged, as well as procure new customers. When you take the time to work on customer development, the communication that it had with customers will give you an idea about the challenges or problems that they have faced with your brand. The customers will also tell you what they like about your website, which is a great reason to dedicate a blog post to a feature that customers love.
Find Inspiration from Others
Be careful not to steal or copy their content, but you should learn what you can from their blogs and see what is working for them. Take that idea and put your own spin on it. Likely, you will not have the exact opinion or outlook on something as another writer. What has worked for other writers is not guaranteed to work for you, and just writing about a topic generally won’t make it successful. You need to be able to add information that is unique, interesting, and useful.
Read Constantly
In general, reading is a great habit to have but when you are part of a brand, aim to learn as much as you can about whatever it is that you are currently working on. In this process, you will get inspiration for new posts from this. Even if you are simply reading out of leisure, inspiration can strike for new posts. For instance, say that you come across a piece about staying productive—you can think about what motivates you to stay productive and you’ll have your own unique piece.
Expand On Your Best Hits
Dive into your own analytics and decipher what your most popular posts are—these are your best hits. No matter how long ago they were published, they are still likely bringing in readers that are discovering the blog for the first time. It is obvious that this content works, so how can you expand upon it? Is it possible to break it down to something even more in-depth? Can the content be updated with a fresh take? Whichever route you take, make sure to go to the original post and link to the new one.
Turn to Google’s Auto-Suggested Results
Open your own new incognito window in Google, and perform a search of a topic that you are interested in writing about. As you begin typing, Google will auto-fill the keyword phrases that people have already searched for. These become your inspiration for your own blog post, of course with your own view and opinions and research. This will also give an indication as to what type of information that your target audience is looking for.
Post About What’s Trending
There are so many ways to find out what is trending on the web, and the key to an on-trend post’s success is to hit it at the right time. For example, if you are in the farming niche, look to the search function of twitter to see what people are tweeting about, use Google Trends to see what is being searched for online, and Reddit will show you an updated news stream. Each of these places will show you what is popular right now on the internet, and seize the opportunity to strike while the iron is hot.
Have a Guest
If you really just need a break from posting or want to mix things up a bit, consider asking a guest to write up a post. Choose someone that you look up to that has the same or similar niche as you that your readers would be interested in. All that you need to do is send them an email asking them to do a guest spot. Come up with a question that will launch them into creating great content for your blog.
Put Together a Guide
The best kind of blog post is one that will make readers want to come back for more, and the best way to do that is to put together a guide of some sort with multiple installments. Look through your old posts and group together those that are related, and put them in an order that makes sense to be used as a guide for something. Put together an introduction, a conclusion, and then descriptions for each link along with the actual links—sending your readers to other content.
Search YouTube
Look for videos that are related to your niche, this allows you to dig a bit deeper into the topic. As the videos play, you may pick up on some new ideas for blog post topics. This also works for podcasts—and again, as long as you have a new and unique take on the topic, you are all set to start your new blog post.
Search Quora
Here you will be able to look through the topics that are relative to your blog posts, and you will see what people are searching the internet for regarding these topics. The content that you create should be answering these questions.
Conclusion
There is no need to spend hours upon hours dwelling on blog post ideas, when there are all of these simple things that you can do to get your brain in gear to think of new topics. Take just a few minutes each day to use one or more of these avenues and then jot down all of your ideas so that you will have them handy when you are in need of a new blog topic.
