Blogging is an interesting way of sharing your knowledge and gaining more knowledge while doing so.
I love blogging because it pushes me to do a lot of research, read on varied topics and put the learning into a format that can be published and shared. And in the process, I become more informed about the subjects I am interested in.
But blogging is a serious business, it demands a lot of time, research and creativity and many times bloggers and writers face, what is called as “Writer’s block”.
This is a condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing. Then there is a struggle to come up with right topics for a blog post, something that is unique and compelling that engages your audience.
While facing such block, it is important to recognise that you just need some inspiration and a little research to come up with new and engaging topics, in more interesting formats.
In this article, I’ll show you 5 quick and easy ways to help you find awesome topic ideas for your post when you are facing the block.
1. Buzzsumo
Which are the hottest subjects in your niche doing rounds on social media?
To know head over to Buzzsumo.com and find out the most popular content in your niche, what your competition is writing and what people are sharing.
You can filter the content by date (the past 24 hours to a year), content type (article, infographics, guest posts and the like), language and country.
Discover popular content by using your industry keywords.
2. Feedly
Feedly is one of the most popular web-based tools for curating and reading relevant content from various reliable sources. It lets you scan all your loved blogs from a single place.
I use Feedly for keeping track of the latest content published on my favorite blogs and topics.
Using Feedly is very simple. You can add websites to your feed from the search bar or from the “Add Content” option located in the left sidebar.
You will find sites that feature the kind of content you are looking for. To add these sites to your read list just click on the green + button.
You can later re-arrange the saved subscriptions in your existing or new categories. Once you add a bunch of high-quality websites inside Feedly, new content ideas will be plentiful.
The bookmark functionality comes handy for marking interesting article so that you can read or go back to the article later.
You can also organise articles in Feedly by adding tags, mark your beloved articles, or save them directly to your Evernote or Pocket account.
You won’t have to manually visit your favorite blogs and content communities to stay on top of the content published.
3. Quora
Quora is one of the largest Question and Answer (Q&A) sites holding high quality and wide-ranging content generated by millions of thought leaders and subject matter experts.
Quora is a wonderful place for researching and coming up with subjects that will resonate with your target audience.
You can find great questions that your prospective audience in your niche is asking. To find them, first, build your Quora profile by adding your areas of expertise in a section called “knows about.”
Once you’ve have added a keyword in your profile, click the “Answer” link on the top toolbar. Quora will show you questions asked by the users around subjects of your expertise.
All the questions are sorted based on an algorithm that considers the posting date and the number of other comments and views.
For each question, there are some statistics available to help you find more popular and relevant questions.
- The number of followers
- The number of answers
- When the question was asked
- How many people are following the question
This process will give to lots of good and answerable questions to write your posts on. Remember, people out there are seeking answers to these questions, so when you are writing a post on one of them, you are actually creating content for an eagerly waiting audience.
4. Google Adwords
If you wish to really find out what your audience is searching for, there is no better place than Google AdWords Keyword Planner.
This free tool from Google allows you to search for any keyword related to your niche or industry and returns up to 800 related keywords and phrases with an average number of searches for each keyword.
For example, if I search for content marketing and look under the Keyword ideas tab, I get the following.
You can easily build a bank of topics which has got high searches and high relevancy in your niche.
You can also extract the low competition ones to come up with new content ideas.
You can also try Ubersuggest for even more keyword suggestions that are sorted alphabetically.
5. Industry Forums
So your next step is to head over to industry forums and see what types of questions people are asking, what conversations are going on?
So for example, if you had a blog about Internet marketing, you’d definitely want to check out the Quick Sprout traffic and conversion forum. So head on over to www.quicksprout.com, click on the forum link, and then just observe the conversations that are already happening in your space, and you get an inside look at what your target audience is interested in.
So, if you had a blog that specialized in SEO, you’d want to click on the search engine optimization link and go to that specific forum, and then look at what topics people are discussing.
These are some interesting ways of finding new blog post ideas for your blog. In any case, the best way is to find out what topics your audience has shown interest in, and then writing a blog post around that.
Quick Recap:
Whenever you are struggling to come up with very engaging and relevant topics, Move over to these five places to find inspiration;
- Buzzsumo: Quickly identify what content is resonating with social audiences in your niche.
- Feedly: A single place to easily read all the content you rely on to think, learn and keep ahead.
- Quora: Find what questions your audience is asking in your specific area.
- Google Adwords: Great way to find out what exactly people are searching for.
- Industry Forums: Listen closely to what people are talking about and what new information they are seeking
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