5 ways to find content ideas?
You might be wondering as to why would I write a blog post with 5 ways to find content ideas when there are hundreds of posts out there which talk about 100, 200 or, even 500+ ways to find content ideas.
So let me put it straight.
While all of these huge guides that have 50, 100 and more ideas look good from a search standpoint and it might even look good from an SEO standpoint as well, I somehow tend to browse away from most of these guides. Why?
Because I have a very poor attention span and retention rate.
With so much of content around you, it is not unforgiving for you to forget anything that you read after the 5th or, the 6th point in a list of 100 things.
These guides with a list post of about 100 things are good to print out and keep it. But eventually it will just stay there in you hard disk and you might not even refer back to them again.
And I am sure a lot of people are like me. But if you are somebody who can digest a post with 100 ideas, you can refer to this post at Kissmetrics. Yes! I have that printed and it is there in my HDD.
But if you are like me, then this post is for you.
I am putting 5 of the most easy ways to find content ideas for your next blog post. These are my top 5 sources out of a select 10 that I follow judiciously.
Ways to Find Content Ideas for Your Next Blog Post
Now, before I jump into the sources, you need to do some preliminary preparation.
- Get Evernote (FREE option) or, One Note
- Create a Note titled “Blog Post Ideas”
- All blog post ideas that you find will go into it.
- Pick one day of the week when you would research blog post ideas
- Spend an hour on this day to find your blog post ideas for the next 2 weeks and generate blog post titles.
That’s it!
This is my exact process to finding blog post ideas.
So, now let us get straight into the 5 different ways to find content ideas.
Quora
I am sure this is the nth time you would have heard about Quora. But how much ever we discuss about this site, it is too little. Quora is that powerful. At the same time, it is also important to mention that in spite of all these discussions about Quora, the site is still under-utilized by internet marketers.
This is my favorite site to find content ideas, not just for my blog post but for my ebooks, niche sites, email newsletter content etc.
Quora is an amazing discussion forum where questions get asked and people answer them. These questions can be the best source for your content.
Here is the step by step process to finding content ideas on Quora.
Step-1: First search for your topic using the search box
Step-2: Select the most relevant topic and click to open it. Scroll through the different questions and find the one that suits your thought process. I found the below 2 questions that can be good ideas for blog posts.
Step-3: Open a relevant question and read through the answers to find content for your blog post. While I was reading through the answers, I found another good question under “related questions” on the right hand sidebar. The question was,”What is the best low cost email marketing tool?”
Now, that’s a question that has a good keyword in it and can form the content idea for my next blog post.
Isn’t that simple?
Similarly you can search for any other topics. Not only will you find good content ideas, you will find long-tail keywords and also a lot of material and information for the blog posts.
Blog Post Comments
About 12 years back, blogs were one of the places where the most interactions happened. A good blogger was one who would interact with his readers by responding to their comments. And I saw some of the biggest and best bloggers doing that all the time.
But today, blogs have become more of a one way communication. The interactions and engagement happens on social media sites and most big bloggers encourage such interactions. It is hence that you will seldom find an author responding to comments and some of the big blogs show the least interactions.
In spite of all this, the popularity of commenting on blogs has not dropped. Go to any popular blog and you will find a lot of people commenting, asking questions and even responding to some of the comments from others.
This is an extremely good resource for blog post ideas. Here is how I do it.
Find 10 high traffic and engaging blogs and add them to your Feedly account. Monitor these blogs daily. You can also comment on them as you read their posts. This way you will also be able to get some traffic to your sites.
Read through their posts and note down any questions that the commentators have asked in their comments in your Evernote or, One Note notes.
Once a week skim through these and filter the questions to form blog post ideas.
Google Related Searches
Google in addition to being a search engine, is also a good brainstorming tool. And this feature is what helps in finding blog post ideas. Google’s suggestion tool and related searches tool, both can serve as a good point to find killer blog post ideas.
As an example, I searched for “email marketing” in Google and you can see some of the nice suggestions that Google shows. These are all potential blog post ideas.
When you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will find “Related Searches” and you can see in the below image that these related searches show some nice blog post ideas. I liked the topic, “email marketing best practices”.
To further check for some more post ideas, I clicked on the topic “email marketing best practices” and that took me to a new search page.
On scrolling down to the bottom of the page, I found some more related searches. I really liked the topic “email marketing content best practices”, which is an idea that I will use for a blog post.
You can see how simple it is to find blog post ideas with some extremely good long tail keywords.
Blog Topic Generators
Blog topic generators are simple tools where you enter a couple of words related to a broad topic and the tool generates headlines and ideas. Though these are simple algorithms that might not be perfect in what they spit out, they are still valuable tools to find blog post ideas.
I use Hubspot’s blog topic generator, which is very effective, accurate and is my favorite.
Using it is very simple. Just enter a broad keyword and hit enter and you will have a list of 5 different post ideas. I entered “email marketing” and here is what I got.
I liked the first topic, “15 best blogs to follow about Email Marketing”. I can easily write a good post on that topic and I will also be able to build some good relationships with some of the bloggers that I will be including in this blog post.
Slideshare
Slideshare is a presentation sharing website and is a storehouse of information. While some of the presentations are of little to ZERO value, there are a lot others which are full of information and knowledge.
The search tool in Slideshare is not that effective, so you will have to spend some time skimming through the presentations to find a good topic.
I entered the search term “email marketing” and Slideshare immediately suggested a search term “25 mind blowing email marketing stats”, which can be a good blog post idea.
Further on searching for “email marketing”, Slideshare returned a few pages with presentations sorted in the order of popularity. I browsed through the various topics and found this one presentation on a very interesting topic.
The topic was “how to recover from email marketing mistakes”. This is an excellent idea for a blog post. And I am sure that I will find some nice content ideas as well inside this presentation.
Over to You
You can follow any or, all of the above ideas to find your blog post ideas. Just ensure you are updating your Evernote notes with the ideas and then once in a week, spend some time filter and editing it to form the perfect title for your blog post.
So which of the above ways to find content ideas for blog posts, did you like the most?
Do let us know by commenting below.
If you have any questions you can write to me using the comment box below or, by using the “contact” option.
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