Coming up with new blog topic ideas can be tricky.
And it’s often just as, if not more, difficult than actually creating the content.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
There are easy, and free, ways to find topic ideas for your next blog post. Ready?
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Blog Topic Ideas: 4 Awesome, Easy-Peasy Strategies for Finding Your Best Topics
Let’s dive in and take a look at the four key ways I research and discover hot topics (this allows me to have a running list of 200+ blog topics at any given time!).
Bucketing Your Topics by Goals (First Things First!)
Before we dive into a few free strategies for finding blog topic ideas, we want to be sure that the topics we’re creating our content around are related to specific goals.
After all, we’re not just trying to create content for the sake of creating content. We also want that content to produce ROI.
When I create content for my content marketing agency’s blog, The Write Blog, I always start by bucketing my topic ideas to one of three goals:
As you can see, my three goals include:
- SEO Rankings
- Sales & Connection
- Brand Awareness
If my topic idea can’t be mapped to a goal, I get rid of it and move on to another topic.
By doing this, I’m able to ensure that I’m not wasting time creating low ROI content that doesn’t impact my business.
I encourage you to use the same strategy to ensure every piece of content you create leads to actual ROI.
Now let’s take a look at the strategies for coming up with worthwhile content development ideas that you can use with the bucketing concept.
1. Ask Your Audience
No one knows more about what your audience wants to read about than your audience.
So ask them.
That’s exactly how this post came to fruition.
When someone joins our Profitable Content Strategists & Marketers Facebook Group (Join the Group!), they’re asked the question:
“What’s your #1 struggle with content marketing or strategy?”
Here are some of the answers we’ve received:
- “I get stuck coming up with new and exciting content!”
- “I struggle coming up with ideas of content focused around my product.”
- “New ideas…”
- “How to find the most appropriate content to target my audience.”
Armed with this information, we knew coming up with blog topic ideas was a major pain-point for a large portion of our audience.
So we wrote about it.
Don’t have an audience big enough to survey?
Jump in one of the hundreds of Facebook groups that feature your audience and follow these steps:
- Ask the creator or a moderator if you can create a poll within the group. Be sure that the question you’re asking is directly related to the audience.
- Come up with 3-5 potential answers to the poll question. Brainstorm 10-15 potential answers to your poll question and cut them down to 3-5 that the group members can choose from.
- Analyze the results and determine how you can create more effective polls in the future. You’re probably not going to get dozens of responses on the first go round. But you should receive enough to get started on a topic while analyzing how you can get more responses in the future.
*Important: This is two-way street. You’re creating value for the Facebook group by increasing engagement and you’re receiving blog topic ideas in return.
Just be sure, however, that you’ve already spent some time (1-2 weeks at a minimum) becoming an active member of the group before trying to use their audience for personal gain.
Takeaway: Eliminate guessing about which blog topic ideas to target by asking your audience directly what they want to know more about.
2. Build an Idea Bank
Consistently having trouble coming up with ideas for your content?
Build an idea bank and get in the habit of adding to it daily.
This is a concept that author James Altucher talks about frequently on his blog.
And while his strategy for becoming an idea machine is based around coming up with general ideas for your life, content marketers can apply the concept as well.
Here’s how:
- Use SEMRush and/or KW Finder to find 20 high volume, low competition keywords related to your industry. While this will take some time, 20 keywords will eventually generate 200+ blog topic ideas.
- Set aside 10 minutes every day to add to your idea bank. It’s optimal to make this the same time every day.
- Pick a keyword to base your daily ideas around. Start with the keywords that have the lowest keyword difficulty based on your research.
- Brainstorm 10 blog topic ideas that include your high volume, low competition keyword. Don’t worry about whether your ideas are good or not. Just get your 10 ideas down and improve them from there.
Once you have a sizeable number of potential blog topic ideas, you can then use the bucketing process we talked about earlier to determine which topics will produce ROI.
Takeaway: By developing a habit for consistently generating topic ideas, you’ll never have a shortage of topics to write about.
3. Use Free Tools
If you’re stuck trying to find solid ideas, there are plenty of free tools that can get you started.
One of my personal favorites is Answer the Public.
To use it, just go to their home page, type in your keyword (short-form keywords work best), and click ‘Get Questions’.
From there, you’ll be provided with dozens of questions and similar phrases that can, at the very least, be used jumpstart your brainstorming process for generating blog topic ideas.
Another solid tool to get your mind working towards coming up with topic ideas is Impact Marketing’s Blog Title Generator.
While it won’t give you near as many ideas as Answer the Public, it’s a great tool for discovering some engaging ways to frame your blog topic through your title.
Impact Marketing’s Blog Title Generator
To use it, just type your keyword in ‘Blog about ____’, click the circular arrows, and you’ll get a potential title for your post.
You can also continue generating ideas through the circular arrows in the middle of the page.
Takeaway: If you’re having trouble brainstorming topics, use free tools like Answer the Public and Impact’s Blog Title Generator to get your mind on the right track.
4. Check Out Quora
Quora is a free social media platform that allows you to see, and answer, questions from real people that are interested in your topic.
It’s a great way to see which questions your audience is asking and want to know more about.
The best part?
If you create a blog post that answers a question asked on the platform, you can post a condensed version as an answer and link out to your blog post.
As far as using it to find your own blog topic ideas, simply type in your keyword in the search bar.
Through the results, you can see dozens of questions that relate to your keyword.
Another perk of Quora is that you can see answers being provided by other experts (and can use those answers as ideas for your own content).
Takeaway: Use Quora to find real questions being asked by your audience related to your keyword.
Start Generating Your Blog Topic Ideas
With the free strategies outlined above, you should have the ammunition you need to generate dozens of blog topic ideas that your audience will love.
When you do come up your list of topics, don’t forget to put them through the bucketing test before getting started (it’ll save your hours of heartache creating low ROI content).
