6 Ways to Come Up with Blog Ideas
Your keyword research will give you much direction on what to blog about. You’ll have to unlock content around specific words. A word is not yet a topic though. Next to a keyword, you’ll need an angle, a specific story around a keyword, to write a blogpost. And as your blog grows, your inspiration can get weary. The following 6 tips for blog ideas will help you to find inspiration to come up with a story around the keywords.
1. Reading other blogs
A great way to come up with ideas for blogpost is to read other posts. Reading the material other people created will most definitely provide inspiration for your own blogposts. Pitfall of reading other people’s work, is that it’s hard to shed your own light on the same topic. It’s hard coming up with your own view after you’ve read someone else’s.
Reading the titles of blogposts can also give you blog ideas for topics. You don’t have to be scared to rephrase someone else’s opinion (instead of creating your own thought) if you only read the titles. Browsing your way through some blogs should give you enough inspiration to come up with new posts for your own blog.
2. Current events
Another way to come up with ideas for blogpost is by referring and writing about current events. Stay tuned on different news sites and write posts in which you incorporate your view on the news in your niche. Perhaps you can install an alert on specific topics. On your blog, you should translate these new messages fitting the exact mission of your blog. If you want to know more about how to use news as a way to create content make sure to check out newsjacking!
3. Get inspiration from your own work
Situations from your own work could also be great inspiration for blogposts. If your clients or colleagues are faced with a certain problem, it could well be that other people encounter the same problem. You should always make sure that you respect the privacy of your client, friends or colleagues and ask for permission to use their case on your blog.
4. Continuing on a previous blogpost
If you have a set of keywords you want to rank on, you should think about writing a series of blogposts about the same topic. Ideally, you’d want to write slightly different posts around the same keyword (focusing on different long tail keywords). One blogpost usually leads to inspiration for more blogposts.
If you’re writing a post, make sure you’re sticking to one topic. If you notice that you’re talking about many things in one post and your post gets quite lengthy, you’re creating a series of post without even realizing it.
5. Interact with your audience
If you invite your audience to leave comments on your blog, you could receive feedback and questions. While most of the feedback will just be nice to hear (or not), you might receive some questions as well. Perhaps some of these questions are easy to answer in a reply, but some questions will be off topic or will need elaboration. Those kind of questions are excellent starters for your next post.
6. Google your own keywords and see what other people write about
Your keyword research has given you input on what words you want to be found for. A way to receive some inspiration for an angle around a specific keyword is to google the keyword you want to optimize a certain post for. What do people actually find if they search for that specific term? Maybe the results inspire you to write something similar, something that will fit in with the present results. But, trying to write something that will stand out could also be a very smart strategy.