You can have all the best blogging tools in the world, but if you don’t have content ideas for blog posts, you’ve got nothing. Read on for 12 ways to think up great content ideas. Your blog will be up to par before you know it!
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Ask your followers what they want to learn about, talk about and read about. This will help you to fill in the gaps. You can also check out the comments on your current blog posts to see what people are saying. You may uncover gaps in information that you can fill in.
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Check out industry blogs, like Kenny Slaught blogs, and look at the blog posts that have the highest number of social shares. Spin these ideas into something that’s your own. You can create a blog post on a similar topic or take one idea from the post and expand it on your own blog.
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Write about your experiences! If you maintain a customer relationship management blog, for example, you can put up a post whenever you have a positive or negative customer service experience yourself.
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Talk about your mistakes and your failures. People love to hear about another professional’s process, particularly if they’re in the same industry. By talking about the times you’ve failed, you can relate to your readers on a personal level.
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Stay on top of trending topics. Setup Google Alerts, read niche blogs and magazines, and stay connected with people in your industry via Twitter. When there’s something new to talk about, you can put up a blog post on the topic to get in on the trend.
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Make a list. These types of articles can be as simple or as in-depth as you want. You can either limit it to just the listed ideas or you can expand on each list addition to flesh out the blog post. You can also take each listed item and create its own blog post in the future.
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If you’ve been writing on the same topic for a few years, create an ultimate guide with all of the articles you’ve posted in the past. You can use this as one single blog post or even as a downloadable guide. Make sure to update the posts so they have the latest information.
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Check out the latest research in your industry and write a blog post that outlines the findings.
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Take a survey of your audience and post the results.
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Write a quiz that your readers can take. This is one of the best ways to get people engaging with your content, especially if you make it so they can share their results on social media.
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Post with your commentary on a news story, particularly one that’s a hot button topic. Just make sure that you’re not going to alienate your target audience. You may even want to write a synopsis of a news story, comment-free, if it goes with your industry.
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Post a glossary of words that are industry-related or that you use as slang in your blog posts.
In order for people to engage with and share your content, you have to create it in the first place!
