You logged into your WordPress dashboard and discovered your editorial calendar is empty.
You quickly checked your Evernote app and what did you see? Empty.
On second thought, you remembered you often store content ideas somewhere in Google docs, but to your total dismay, you still found it’s empty.
So what’s the next thing to do at this juncture?
Let me tell you, bloggers and content writers have to deal with lots of emptiness, this is a natural phenomenon; however, what matters most times is how you deal with it.
Obviously, generating content ideas can be a big struggle for most people, especially when you’re like me that publish multiple blog posts per week.
Being successful at content marketing demands for a consistent supply of content ideas…
…ideas that will intrigue, enchant, and spark a burning fire in the mind of your readers.
So, what happens when you lack these ideas? How do you maintain a continuous flow of blog posts even when it seems your brain is not functioning again?
In today’s article, I’m going to share with you 5 exciting ways you can use to come up with blog post ideas any day, anytime (even when you’re sleeping).
All the tools I’ll mention on this post have worked, and are still working for many. You, therefore have to start leveraging them too to always stay afloat of the competition.
How to Easily Generate Lots Of Blog Post Ideas
1. Check Out Stumble Upon Buzz (Update: Quitting the scene though)
One feature most people do not know about StumbleUpon is their popular (buzz) pages meant for different subjects. These pages display the most viewed articles that the StumbleUpon audience enjoyed and voted for.
When you land on any of the categories, you will not only see the most popular pages, but you’ll also see exactly the number of visits StumbleUpon sent to them which is excellent to choose the right topics that will work for you.
Apparently, I’m not asking you to copy titles or ideas directly, but instead, you should use this as inspiration to know the titles that have proven to work well – the type of topics that people want to read about – and to also find out the angles that people in your industry are taking.
In StumbleUpon buzz section, you can literally find ideas in any niche imaginable, with some good examples being their beauty, fitness, fashion, marketing, humor, and politics sections.
To also see what’s happening in other niches, just change the tag in the URL to your desired topic, and you’ll find the popular content around that topic.
2. Check Out Google Autofill
There is a cool feature on Google that most people are not aware of – this simple hack has given me lots of blog post ideas, and you can also get your own ideas from it in any niche.
While typing to perform a search in Google, have you ever noticed the form that usually drops down when you’re entering your search terms into the search box?
This form always tries to guess what you’ll type next, it’s called “Google Autofill,” and you can use that to your advantage.
The Google Autofill can help you unveil lots of blog post ideas you never knew existed in your industry.
I want you to try this right now and tell me what you see. Just start typing in your keyword and see what related search terms appear. You never know what’ll pop up.
For example, let’s assume I have a blog on the “Skin Care” niche, and I’m trying to come up with some blog post ideas.
In the Google search box, I’ll type (best skin care tips for). Let’s see the result below:
As you can see, if I have a blog on this topic, I already have some content ideas to work on. You can also follow the same procedure to come up with even more ideas – just tweak the search terms.
3. Use Moz Keyword Explorer
Visit the keyword explorer section of Moz Pro and enter your target keyword. We’ll still use the “skin care tips” keyword for this example:
On this page, scroll down and click on “keyword suggestions”:
Click on the “display keyword suggestions” drop-down and select “are questions”:
Here’s you’ll see a list of potential blog post titles for your topic. About 324 keywords to be precise.
The “Relevancy” column displays how closely the search term matches the initial keyword you used, and as you may already know, the “Volume” column shows estimations of monthly organic search traffic.
NOTE: Moz pro is a premium tool, and it’s totally worth all the investments if you can afford it, however, you can also use the free version to get the same result, which was what I used for this example.
It’s just that the pro version will help you do a lot of other important things to ensure you select the best keywords/blog topics to work on.
4. Use Buzzsumo
One of the best ways to break writer’s block is to check out the topics that people already like in your industry and see how you can create something similar (or even better).
What’s the easiest way to know this?
Visit Buzzsumo.com, and plug in any topic that’s related to your niche. In this example, let’s use the “Dog Training” niche.
I will, therefore, enter “how to train a Dog” in the search box of Buzzsumo:
From the page above, I can see the blog posts related to my search term that’s already performing well (judging by their social media shares).
The next thing will now be to select the titles that most appeal to me and tweak them a bit, so it won’t appear as if I just copied the person.
Again, when it comes to Buzzsumo, apart from entering a keyword in your niche on the search box, you can also search a particular site in your industry that you know is popular, and Buzzsumo will show you the most popular posts on the blog which you can imitate.
Therefore, with Buzzsumo, I’m sure you won’t run out of blog post ideas again.
5. Read As If Your Life Depends on It
This is probably the most valuable advice here. There are two basic things you must always do if you dream of becoming an excellent writer, the two things are:
- Read a lot
- Write a lot
These two things alone will inevitably make you an extraordinary writer in any niche. As a blogger who want to be updating his blogs regularly, you must always feed your brain with fresh ideas every single day – this is non-negotiable.
There are so many wonderful blogs on the internet, all you have to do is make a list of your favorite ones, subscribe to their email list, and follow them on social media, this way, you’ll always know when they have something new on their blogs.
The more you read their stuff, the more you’ll get an inflow of blog post ideas.
However, apart from reading blog posts, you should also form the habit of reading books. Even though we don’t always have enough time to do all that, but reading one book whenever you have the time will go a long way into positioning you as an enviable writer in your niche.
Don’t take my words for it; check out what the guys at Groove Hq have to say about this:
Conclusion
Here you have it all. I’ve played my own part – I’ve laid down for you what has been working for me in coming up with blog post ideas. Now, what you do with these tips is entirely up to you. You have to understand that the more useful content you publish on your blog, the more Google indexes your site, and the more traffic you’ll be able to amass.
Remember that even though these strategies make it easy to generate blog post ideas, they can’t force you to place your fingers on your keyboard and start writing. It’s up to you to take action right now.
The more you perform these tasks, they more topic ideas you will come up with, such that you won’t even know what to do with them. Get to work now.