6 ways to generate blog ideas when you’re drawing a blank
We all know that content marketing reigns supreme when it comes to building links, fuelling social media conversations and building better SEO rankings. In fact, more and more marketers are prioritising content creation, with 56% of B2B marketers describing their organisation as being extremely or very committed to content marketing, according to findings from the 2018 benchmark, budgets and trends report from the Content Marketing Institute.
Around 75% of the top performing brands create content consistently or frequently, so there’s little doubt that many brands value content creation. But what happens when you just can’t think of a blog title or article topic to update your site? Writer’s block happens to the best of us but fortunately, there are several tools and techniques you can employ to get your creativity flowing and your list of blog ideas brimming over.
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Consult with BuzzSumo
Available as both a free and subscription tool, BuzzSumo makes it easy to quickly identify top performing blog posts and articles around any subject. Simply input a keyword, a topic or even a company name and it will give you a list of the best performing pieces of content on that topic, ranked by social media shares and number of links.
You can use this list to inspire your content efforts – it should give you plenty of ideas for strong-performing blog post titles.
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2
Check out Google Trends
Google Trends is an under-used resource for many in-house marketers. It can be used in a number of ways – it showcases trending stories and provides visualisations of data but you can also input a search term, keyword or topic to access a list of related topics and breakout search terms These are searches becoming more popular on Google so you can build new content around those emerging search terms. Not only will this make blog idea creation much easier, it will also give you a head start optimising for emerging search phrases.
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3
Ask your customer service team
Any member of staff dealing with your customers or sales prospects is likely to be a wealth of ideas for content. The trick is to harness that insight. Start by asking them to record commonly asked questions and store the document in the cloud using a service like Google Docs. This will ensure the file can be updated and that you’ll always have a treasure trove of questions and queries to build new articles and blog posts around.
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Use social media trending topics
Don’t underestimate social media when it comes to generating blog post ideas. Twitter makes it easy to see trending topics with its hashtag sidebar – even a cursory search will reveal a host of subjects and events generating interest and buzz on the platform. While not all of these trending topics will be relevant to your own business, they should provide occasional inspiration for topical, timely and relevant blogs. Don’t forget to share your subsequent content on social media using the same hashtag.
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Delve into Google Analytics
In addition to informing your wider marketing strategy and actions, you can also use Google Analytics for inspiration when you’re struggling to generate fresh blog ideas. With its abundance of data you can use Analytics for post ideas in several ways – try creating a dashboard to show your most popular blog articles for the last six months and then build out a list of additional posts around that same topic using a spoke and cluster approach.
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6
Ask your audience
Don’t be afraid to admit that you’re looking for new blog post ideas. Ask your audience what they want to see – you can do this via a reader survey or by simply posing the question on social media. What does your audience want to see more of? Are there any topics they want you to tackle or advice and tips they’d like you to share? Ask this question often and you’ll only find it easier to create new blog post titles when you’re lacking in inspiration, you can also be confident that the content you’re creating will resonate with readers.
If you’re still stuck for blog post ideas, why not try our 100 blog post planner? We’ll use all of these techniques plus more to create a calendar of 100 blog post titles for you.