Coming up with blog topics is often the bane of any blogger’s existence. Coming up with content for a blog for the same niche day after day and year after year can seem impossible. But, the truth is, it’s not really that difficult if you plan ahead. You need to focus on your niche and your audience with each piece of content, as well as understand the purpose of the blogging content.
Read about Your Industry – Keeping up to date about your industry will go far in helping you have ideas about what to write about. Information that experts talk about in magazines and in the news is wonderful fodder for future blog posts.
Read Competitors’ Blog Posts – Choose a few high-powered competitors in your niche to read what they have to say. Sign up for their newsletters, and read on a regular basis what they have to say about your niche. You will come up with ideas from reading.
Brainstorm Each Day – Take a few minutes each day to put pen to paper (or keyboard to document) to write down any idea that comes to mind. Just make a list as fast as you can about different topics to write about on your blog.
Ask for Guest Bloggers – Keep your blog open for guest blog posts. If you bring in other experts, people will actually view you as even more of an expert. Establish rules or originality and uniqueness for guest bloggers.
Come Up with a New View – As you read what others are saying, or even what you’ve said in the past, try to come at the subject matter from a new angle. Perhaps if you wrote “10 reasons to Blog Daily”, you might pick just one of the reasons to expand on.
Repurpose Older Content – Older content likely needs to be updated, but instead of updating it where it stands, why not write a new post about it, link to the old post from the new post and vice versa. Explain how the posts differ today and why.
Ask Readers for Questions – Readers and your audience are the perfect people to get content ideas from. Blog posts are the perfect place to highlight a reader’s question and answer them. You can then also add them to your FAQ.
Keep a Notebook Ready for Inspiration – You’re going to think of things to blog post about during the day when you’re not able to write. Find a way to keep track, either on paper or via a recording device on your smartphone or both. Don’t think you’ll remember later. You won’t. Even if it’s just a small inkling of an idea, keep track of it.
Consider the Minutia – Sometimes bloggers get carried away with the big picture. However, you can take it down smaller than that and focus on the minutia, the things beginners want to know, in order to come up with more blogging topics.
Change Formats – If something is a textual piece, you can change it to a podcast or a video. If it’s a “how to” piece then you can change it to a more informational piece instead of a how to. Switching up the format of a past blog post can help you create a new way to tell your audience about something important.
Curate Other People’s Content – This is mining for content that your audience would enjoy that is relevant to your niche, and then sharing it with your audience via a link on your blog. But, there is a little more to it than that. Be sure to add your own thoughts in your introduction to the information you are sharing.
When it comes to coming up with content on a regular basis for your blog, you cannot wait for or rely on inspiration. You need to keep records of ideas, develop a publication calendar based on the products and services that you want to promote and create a regular writing schedule. Believe it or not, a regular planned writing schedule will produce better work than just waiting around for motivation. Using these suggestions should give you endless content ideas.