Say you’re sitting on your desk, you have your pen and paper, your favorite coffee and some relaxing music in the background and you’re ready to blog. Yet you feel like you’re not inspired by anything and you keep hitting a dead end. Writer’s block is very common among bloggers, especially if you blog regularly or if you’ve been blogging for a long time. If coming up with fresh and new blog ideas is standing between you and your content marketing strategy, this post will help you overcome that.
Writer’s block, or creative block, is possibly as old as writing itself. And it doesn’t just happen to writers. Creatives from all walks of life can suffer from it.
Feel free to use any of the below ideas; or all of them if applicable and set sail to your imagination and inspiration.
5 ways to come up with blog ideas
Before we jump in the ways straight away, if you don’t have a blog yet or you’re thinking of starting one, the following blog posts will help you:
- Find out the benefits of blogging
- Learn how to start a blog in 19 minutes
- Check these 10 tips that will help you choose a name for your business or blog
- Learn how to blog in 5 simple steps
- Check these 18 tips to help you start a WordPress blog
In this article we will cover five ways that will help you come up with tens of original blog ideas. The below strategies will work, no matter which topics you blog about.
- Days to mark and celebrate
- Check your competition
- Get inspired by what worked in the past
- What your audience needs
- Interview an expert
Let’s dive deep into each strategy.
1. Days to mark and celebrate
That’s a very easy and simple strategy to come up with fresh blog ideas. There are some important days that everyone celebrates and can use for blogging inspiration. Like the New Year’s, you can use that time of the year to blog about the past year’s resolutions, the most important things that happened in your industry for the past year and your expectations for the next year. Also, most industries can take advantage of Valentine’s Day or Mother's Day and use these events to come up with different blog ideas, like gift guides, appreciation posts or personal experiences.
At the same time, every industry has special days to celebrate. You can always look up these days on the internet and find a list related to your industry.
- The following are some bizarre days that you can blog about if you have a tech blog:
15 Jan: Wikipedia Day - 28 Jan: Data Privacy Day
- 1 March: World Maths Day
- 14 March: Pi Day (Also, Albert Einstein's birthday)
- 31 March: World Backup Day
- 30 April: Birth of the World Wide Web
- 4 May: Star Wars Day
- 12 September: Programmer Day
- 3 October: Techie Appreciation Day
And the list goes on and on…
You’ll find something every month to blog about and celebrate, this is also a chance to have some seasonal articles in your blog.
2. Check your competition
When we say check what your competition is doing, we don’t mean that you should steal their blog ideas. But you can learn a lot from checking what your competitors are writing about and use that to inspire you to create your own content.
You can also use some platforms to help you with this, like BuzzSumo and Ubersuggest.
In BuzzSumo, you can enter a domain, and it’ll show you the most shared URLs from that domain. You can check these URLs and find the topics that most resonate with people, and maybe offer an interesting and unique take on any of them.
You have to keep in mind that what works for others won’t necessarily work for you too. Yet, this is a great technique to help you build a list of blog ideas that you know that people are already interested in reading.
3. Get inspired by what worked in the past
Instead of checking what your competition do only, why don’t you also check your best blog articles and repurpose existing content?
Let’s say you wrote a blog post about the steps for creating a YouTube channel for your business and this article was a huge success. You can then follow it up with another blog that talks about making money from YouTube or perhaps a piece about using YouTube for your digital marketing efforts .
Different people like to consume content differently. So, you can take a key point from a post and use it in other posts and re-purpose existing content by simply re-framing it. This will give you the chance to write different blog posts discussing the same topic from different angles and then link these blog articles to each other.
4. What your audience needs
You write content to help your audience, right? Then you need to know what they need help with. Instead of guessing what they need help with, you can just ask them or check what they ask about on the internet.
How can you ask them? Well, there are different ways either through emails, social media, or blog comments. This way your audience will feel involved and engaged with the content that you create.
If you’re doing customer stories and talking to your customers, then you’ll probably hear a lot about the different problems and challenges that they face. These topics aren’t necessarily related to your product or service, but they might be related to the industry that you’re involved in.
For example, when we talk to entrepreneurs or small business owners, they usually tell us the challenges that they face when they decided to start their own business. So, we dedicated a full section in our blog to give tips and insights for startup and small business owners.
By talking to your customers and solving their problems, you’re not only coming up with new blog ideas but you’re also building deeper relationships with them. They will most likely want to do business with you again and might even recommend you to their friends.
Another way to find out what your audience needs is by looking it up yourself on Google or Quora. You can check the topics and questions that people are asking and use that as an inspiration for your next content calendar.
5. Interview an expert for blog ideas
The final strategy that you can use to come up with unique blog ideas is to talk to the experts. You can use different approaches like use the interview as research for an original piece, publish the transcript, or use the audio or video in a blog post itself.
Like the following blog post, which is a Q&A transcript of an interview with Yoast SEO plugin CTO Omar Reiss. The interview was conducted during WordPress Camp Europe in Berlin.
Another example is the following blog article, which discusses influencer marketing. We interviewed Tanaz Dizadji, the founder of insydo.com and Brandripplr, and she gave us some insights that we included in the article along with the interview video.
Are you ready to come up with new blog ideas?
We hope that these five tips will help give you a new perspective when you’re coming up with content ideas to keep your blog fresh, interesting and engaging.
