Finding ideas for your blog post can be tough, especially when you feel like you’ve shared all of your knowledge about your products and services in your website page content. But have no fear! We’ve put together the best resources to find inspiration that will fill your blog schedule to infinity!
One quick note:
Before diving into the tools and resources we’ve gathered, remember one important thing: Your blog post should be relevant and helpful to your audience. If you are not focusing on what your audience wants to know or would find interesting, you are wasting your time if you care about ranking your page in Google.
All set? Let’s go!
1. Answer questions that people are asking
The most valuable thing you can do for your business is to provide both current and potential customers the answer to questions they have about your product, service, or industry. This can build loyalty with your current customers and attract new business by being more helpful than your competition. Find ideas for your next blog post from customers and the community.
Straight from the customer
If you have the luxury of talking to your customers directly in your shop or on social media, start gathering a list of the most common questions that they ask before considering doing business with you. These questions will not only help you come up with great content to write, but will also help drive more traffic and interest to your business through your blog.
For example, I created this post because my clients often ask me how to find inspiration for new content! I wrote this article to provide a resource for them and for others who might find this topic useful.
Online Communities and Forums
Need to find questions that people are asking in your industry? Groups and forums are a great way to find real questions being asked by real people.
Quora is a great place to find questions that people are asking about your industry. Simply search the site using your products/services and you’ll find a plethora of questions and answers that you can use as inspiration for your next blog post.
Facebook Groups is another source to find great blog topics by researching conversations that people are having around a particular product, service, industry, or interest.
If you are logged in, the link above will take you to a page with recommended groups based on your Facebook Profile. To search for groups:
- Use the search bar and try a few keywords that match the products, services, industry or interest that you want to target
- On the results page, select groups from the top navigation to see a list of groups that match your search
- If you want to narrow your results further, there are filtering options on the left sidebar
2. Find out what your competitors are writing about
Using your competitors for research can give you great ideas for your next blog post. If you know who some of your main competitors are, you can do a little bit of spying to see what topics they are writing about on their website and social media channels.
There are more advanced ways to dive deeper into how effective your competitors are at getting their content seen and shared. (We will be writing an article on how to do that in the coming weeks.)
Competitor Websites and Blogs
Visit your competitor’s or industry websites and find their blog pages (the links are usually in the top navigation or in the bottom footer navigation). Search through their posts to find topics that they are writing about.
If there are comments on any of those posts, read through them to understand how they are interacting with their audience to uncover more content that you can use to write about your topic.
Bonus: If you find a topic that inspires you, try to write it better than your competitor by providing more detail and resources. This will help your post rank higher in search results if Google deems your content is more valuable to people searching for your topic.
Competitor Social Media
Your competitors will no doubt have social media channels where they share information about your industry. Visit Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn channels and search for your competitors there. You’ll find a great list of ideas for your blog posts, and will also see the likes and shares. This will help you determine which content is most effective at engaging an audience.
3. Use Google Search and Trends
Google has some great free resources to quickly find topics that people are searching for. Using Google as a research tool will help you find the most used search terms. This can help you focus on a great topic that people are actively seeking answers for.
Google Suggest
You may have noticed when you type something into Google search, a list of suggestions pops up. This is Google suggesting search terms based on what others have searched for in the past. Using this feature, you can start with some industry terms or even a “How to” search. Dummies.com has a great article on Choosing Effective Keywords for Search Engines
For example:
A search for “how to start a business online” suggests these other topics:
- how to start a business online for free
- how to start a business online from home
- how to start a business online as a teenager
Using a combination of keywords and phrases, you can easily compile a list of 50 topics to use as inspiration in minutes.
Google Trends
Want to see if your search terms are getting traction? Google Trends is a free resource that gives detailed information about topics and searches. You can use this tool to see how trendy your blog post idea is and also dive deeper into demographics, related topics, and related searches.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these resources help you generate ideas for your next blog post (or next 50)! Once you’ve done this a few times, you will start to find it easy to write content that gets noticed. Bonus: When building your blog inspiration list, use a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets to keep things organized.
Want help with creating content for your blog, keyword research, or SEO? Send us a message
Happy blogging!
