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How to Find Blog Post Ideas

Andrey Novoselov
How to find blog post ideas

Blog Post Idea Generators: Why They Are Trash

If you surf the internet, plenty of generators will come come up. Despite the fact that they offer free tools and are aimed at delivering ideas for your blog posts, these generators have a few disadvantages, such as:

How to Validate Idea on Traffic

To come up with blog ideas and fill your site with the most relevant content, use Google Trends. It will show you what people from all over the world are looking for. You’ll need to indicate a search query or a topic. It is also possible to look through the search history and stats to make comparisons and conclusions regarding your topic popularity.

There are more advanced services, such as SeRanking, displaying the statistics of search queries in Google, Bing and Yandex (a Russian search engine). Google Keywords Planner is also an alternative that delivers trend statistics.

Strategies

There are plenty of strategies to ensure your content is relevant and valid. Let’s take a look at the most popular strategies, discuss their implementation ways and choose which one will suit you best.

Get Content Ideas From Your Community

Look for direct communication with your audience on social networks, industry-specific and general forums and other platforms. Choose communities that resonate with your blog’s topic and include users into a discussion. They might ask for help, raise questions and even bring up sore points.

Also, you can get the blog post ideas from your own followers. There are many ways to “draw” the necessary information from the members of your community, such as follows:

Choose one of your most loyal followers (who reacts to your posts most frequently than others) and explore their profile to reveal preferences and interests and use this information to make more appealing posts in future.

Using Google Suggestions / Do Keyword Research

In this section, you’ll find some tools to automate the process of choosing the relevant keywords which next will become a foundation for your blog posting ideas.

  1. Ahrefs boasts the highest accuracy when collecting semantics.
  2. Moz’s keyword explorer helps creating query kernel based on the geolocation. Its filters allow to exclude certain terms.
  3. Keywordtool.io takes data from Google, YouTube, Bing, and Amazon. You can select the recommended keywords for each domain and taking into account both geolocation and the language. You can get some thousands of the keywords for free, but to access additional features, you’ll need a paid subscription.
  4.  KWFinder is available in 5 countries and supports the 5 most widespread languages. It offers several parameters to filter the obtained results.
  5. Scrapebox introduces numerous recommendations on utilizing thousands of keywords for search optimization by thematic requests. Note that it is compatible only with the Windows operating system.

Read Often and Find Ideas Inside the Content

How often do you read other blogs and wince at the sight of shallowness, ignorance and poor understanding of the subject? Stop feeling frustrated and pay attention to the main ideas of the text rather than its imperfections. If you are able to separate the wheat from the chaff, the content you read might give you an insight on how to present this topic better and write a more relevant article.

Analyze Quora

Quora is a platform where millions of people ask questions to get the best answers. You can follow the topics you are interested in, and in order to create the original website content idea, choose which of them are relevant to your niche. Each answer has a number of upvotes and downvotes showing other people’s opinion on its relevance to the question asked, and it is also possible to share the question on social media.

You can enter the set of keywords in the search bar to see topics about them. One of the best things in Quora is that it is legally allowed to reuse and publish its content on other websites, if you link back to the Quora’s original articles and posts.

SEMrush also finds traffic generating topics and provides you with keyword analysis tools that are accumulated into one Keyword Magic tool. You can use at least one seed keyword to get tons of them in response. It is better to make a list of topics relevant to your blog and enter one of those topics into the search box to get organic, paid and trend keywords.

Pay attention to the full list of keywords that the system finds in response to your topic. Some of them might seem you slightly irrelevant, but they can be of use to attract a bigger audience to your blog.

Figure Out What Your Readers Want

Look through all received data to have a better understanding of your audience’s interests and preferences. People read blogs for a reason. Some of them seek general guidelines and tips, while others look for information for business development. Sharing knowledge allows hundreds of users to learn from the experience of others and act in the most efficient way. And there are always people who simply look to enjoy their time while reading some fun information, which they may not need in the future.

The ultimate goal of writing a post is always to attract the attention of your audience and promote your blog. Even if you know the preferences of your current followers perfectly, you’ll hardly attract new readers without being aware of what they might look for. Keeping the posts relevant and informative will also make your audience return to your blog instead of searching for other websites.

Using Amazon Look Inside

Amazon has a nice tool called Look Inside (Inside the Book) allowing you to find books matching a search query and look through its text. Thus, you’ll be able to have a free preview of Kindle and print books. Signing up for the program will  provide you with the following benefits:

As a result, you will be able to successfully collect plenty of creative blog post ideas.

Talk to Your Readers

Try to initiate communication around your publications, and when the users express their thoughts, take them as hints as to what techniques have been the most effective incentives.

End your posts with a call to action, asking readers to comment on your article. Leave your own comments and reviews too, and don’t forget to respond to your followers. This is the best way to start a fruitful discussion which might give you a better understanding of your audience and bring new ideas for future articles.

Ask Your Twitter/Facebook/Instagram Followers

To conduct a survey on social networks, use one of these free or commercial approaches. Let’s talk about Facebook first:

  1. Create a survey with an option to leave a comment on the same page.
  2. You can use one of Facebook widgets to track the survey in real-time and close or edit it whenever you want. Also, you can choose how exactly the response options will be presented and add images if needed.
  3. Use Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, Polldaddy and other similar services. While Google Forms is free of charge, SurveyMonkey has both free and paid versions, and so do other platforms.

You can create a free-of-charge poll on Twitter and be able to see its results, but the platform doesn’t allow you to add images.

Another option is to use Instagram Stories. You can add a video or an image as a new story. Then, open swipe panel to pick the Survey sticker and place it on the screen. Write your question and offer 2 possible answers. Then, you can publish your story. However, your survey will disappear in 24 hours.

Find Questions on Twitter

Friends and followers always share questions that are good sources for your blog’s ideas. Some services on the web allow you to find all of them fast and without hassle. For example, Replyz provides a platform where everybody can take part in a well-organized question and answer session on Twitter. You can see a live stream of questions and help others ask questions, or answer them outside Twitter.

Also, there is Cyfe allowing to monitor and archive Twitter search results. The program is free, but you’ll have to buy a premium subscription to access unlimited dashboards and widgets.

Scan Social Media, Forums and Other Online Communities

The following services allow to monitor the audience’s behavior and see what they think of your blog. Thus, you will be able to make informed decisions and find more appealing ideas for blog content.

Keyhole is aimed at following your Twitter and Instagram accounts and collect information on current discussions and previous comments.

Hootsuite permits to track the audience’s activity on several social networks including Foursquare and WordPress. While searching, you can filter conversations by a keyword, hashtag and location to understand what people think about your brand, competitors and industry in general.

Digimind is designed to help you know your audience better, measure marketing ROI and analyze your reputation. Also, it is able to predict upcoming trends within your field by tracking startups that are raising money at the moment of search.

Use Reddit to Get Unique Blog Topics

Reddit is a very popular network with a vast audience, and for this reason, it is perfect for getting a content idea inspiration. It is one of the world’s most popular websites, and it can give you a perfect understanding of the current trends.

Besides, it’s 43% more engaging than Facebook. You’ll find plenty of active discussions there with hundreds of comments on every topic. There are 1.2M topic-specific forums called subreddits. Here is what you need to know in order to enrich your content with fresh ideas:

  1. The search box at the top right corner of a page will show you groups where people discuss the same topic. Save the links for all of the relevant subreddits you’ve found
  2. Use specific words (“Help me”, “How can I”, “Tips”, etc.) to see what people look for
  3. Select the most active discussion
  4. Read the comments attentively to find topics that are relevant and might attract your audience in future

To find out the most relevant communities and discussions, filter them by the keywords. You can also generate loads of content ideas with the Reddit Enhancement Suite tool to find comments.

Encourage Comments and Emails

To engage in a dialogue with your readers, ask questions in your articles. Most of the advanced posts have at least one numbered list. Ask readers to add it with their own points. Create a concept, theory or idea to introduce it in a thought-provoking way. It is okay to be controversial, just don’t forget to answer questions/comments/reviews written in response to your post.

Try to publish your personal information to generate reader interest. Select active users and ask them additional questions in the private messages to get a deeper understanding of their views.

Share Your Experiences (Even Small Ones)

Sharing your personal information normally generates interest to the post, so feel free to tell about your achievements, mistakes and life lessons you’ve learned. Just remember that readers might overreact because people adore interfering into the affairs of others and giving advice. If you lack your own experience, look for similar blogs on the internet to reveal other people’s experiences and use them as benchmarks.

Do Deep Analysis of a Topic

Most likely, you’ll need special tools to analyze texts and use the completed outputs as a foundation for further searches. Each blogger develops their own strategy, but some strategies are common for every case. It is important to analyze the topic itself (its relevance, in particular) and the quality of your text. A particular scheme is generated to make the next idea searches much faster and easier.

Analyze YouTube Videos

This tool is useful for those who need travel blog post ideas. YouTube is the second greatest search engine and has an audience of over 1.8B people. More than 5B videos are watched daily. In the graph below, you’ll see a comparison of different networks based on their audience size. Use Youtube to your advantage by looking for the most popular videos within your field and select those with the highest number of views and comments. These videos and feedback from the audience might give you an insight into what topics will interest people in future.

Analyze Chats in Messengers

Instant messengers allow you to join a real communication and get in touch with people fast. For example, Telegram managed to become a must-have messenger for the majority of companies and communities, and it is used to glean ideas, ask questions and get answers. To find a relevant channel in TG, use the search box and type the username starting with @. If you’re looking for a list of Telegram channels, look through Telegram Channels Catalog. All the channels are categorized there to get fast and relevant results.

Best Ways to Get Ideas for Blog Posts

As you can see, blog post ideas generators are quite often out-of-date and cannot ensure accuracy, relevance and high quality of their output. With the strategies mentioned in this article, anyone will be able to create unique and interesting content. Briefly, you might find it useful to reach out to your followers and contact readers on other platforms, launch surveys and organize events within your social media. You can also add software in order to automate the search for popular requests, and recourse to different types of content such as videos, for example. Communication with people will help you find an inspiration for your new blog post ideas and deliver the most relevant materials.

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