3 quick ways to get blog post inspiration

Mine Google Trends

Google is a treasure trove of blog post ideas, no matter your industry. What’s more, if you head to Google Trends, you’ll get an up-to-the-minute view of search trends and user behavior. This tool has recently been updated, making it even more valuable as a source of inspiration. You can use it in lots of different ways depending on what you’re struggling with when it comes to blog content.

Right at the top of the page, you’ll see a search box where you can drop in your main topic to see what’s trends or, click on one of the trending stories below. These are current events and people that are at the top of the search interest list. You can use this as a starting point for blog ideas by trying to link those trending topics with your own company.

For example, one day after Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle announced their engagement, the pending Royal Wedding was the hottest topic on Google.

If you’re a caterer or food brand, you could use this knowledge as inspiration for a Royal-themed post, capitalizing on the buzz which surrounded the nuptials. If you’re a travel company, you could have used the engagement as a jumping off point for a top honeymoons post.

Still lacking inspiration? Click into the trending topic and you’ll be presented with a wealth of data which shows top questions around that topic, gives a map of search activity, trending queries and related topics – all of these can again be used as inspiration for topical and timely blog post titles.

If there’s nothing trending that’s relevant, you can also type in any keyword and you’ll be presented with a graph showing search popularity over time. You’ll also get useful data such as related topics and related queries – a treasure trove of potential blog post titles.

If that’s not enough, there’s a recently trending break down plus access to the year in search – which should provide you with more than enough data to jot down a few possible blog post angles.

In this example, we’ve typed in ‘content marketing’ as the search term. Just looking at the related queries box gives two or three potential blog titles straight off the bat. And, if this year’s content marketing trends and content marketing conferences have already been covered in the blog, it’s easy to navigate across to the related topics column to dig up some more inspiration.

Use BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a great online tool if you’re stuck for blog ideas that people are actually interested in. It analyzes which content has performed best for any topic or any competitor. Just tap in your subject and get a list of articles, infographics and videos which have proved most popular over your desired time period (for example, the last 24 hours, one month or one year). You can sort results by total shares so you see the best performing titles at the top.

For each result, you’ll be able to see number of Facebook engagements, LinkedIn shares, Twitter shares and Pinterest shares. It will also give you date, author and publisher.

Again using content marketing as the example, we can see that the most popular posts tend to be listicle formats and focus on trends, tips and tools. Already, that provides a huge pool of blog inspiration.

When you type a search into Google or Bing, auto suggest will kick in with suggested search terms. AnswerThePublic.com says not only is this marketing gold, it’s also one of the most underutilized tools around. Using this as its inspiration, Answer The Public makes light work of generating dozens of suggestions based on a single search term. Just input a keyword related to your business or time of the year and click get questions. You’ll be presented with an incredibly useful diagram of content suggestions –so many in fact it could keep you inspired for the whole year.

A search for ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ generates 75 ideas – perfect if you’re a health and wellness company, a lifestyle or business coach or similar.