How to Come Up With Blog Content Ideas
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I don’t know about you, but when I started blogging, I had no idea how hard it would be to come up with ideas for content.
Originally I thought I’d write about my day, how awesome my dog is, who I like to read, maybe a blog about a DIY project, and a few other random things, but I had no idea that “personal” content is not what draws readers to your blog. As I got a little older and took a few business and marketing classes, it became glaringly obvious just how naïve I was to think people wanted to read what I had to say without me first giving them a reason to want to.
So I started digging, and while it took a few tries, I finally figured out the trick to not only finding topics to talk about, but also creating content people actually want to read.
And it all begins with the handy dandy SEARCH BAR.
That’s right, the Search Bar is your new best friend if you want to create relevant content that draws readers in.
Of course, you don’t use it the same way you would as if you were the one looking for the solution to a problem.
Instead, you want to pick a topic within the niche you’re writing about and start typing it into the search bar of your favorite search engine.
I always use Google or Pinterest.
As you type you’ll begin to notice that the search engines have been programmed to be intuitive and they begin prompting you with words and phrases that may be relevant to your search.
The thought behind this tool is to be of even more assistance to the user than they are by just providing them with a place to search.
The reason for this is because there are dozens of other search engines you could be using, so this helpful assistance was at one time, their edge.
Keep this idea of having an edge over your competition on the back burner for now though, we’ll come back to that shortly.
Instead, let’s get back to the word we’ve entered into the search bar. For this article I used the words “blog content” as my topic of inspiration.
Below is what both Google and Pinterest showed me as a result.
As you can see, I didn’t even need to finish typing the word I was looking for before both engines began providing me with ideas similar to my search. Upon looking at them, I noticed both of these search engines listed “blog content” as number one, and “blog content ideas” as number two. Since “blog content ideas” encases the first option, number two is the better option for a topic as it will rank for both searches. The thing to note about the top search results, however, is that the bigger the topic, the bigger the competition in people trying to provide solutions to the problem. Now, if you’re looking for more concentrated traffic because you want to make money with your blog, the second option probably isn’t your best bet to do that. Instead, you’d probably want to go with lower listings where it may be easier to have your article be recognized, indexed, and ranked. This is where another tool comes in, and that’s Google’s Keyword Planner. This tool provides you with the same information, but it goes a step further and tells you how many searches a month occur for a certain search, as well as how much competition exists for that topic. It's also great if you want to see the basic information about the topics you’re looking into. Unfortunately, this is no longer a free access tool - you have to have a Google Ads campaign in order to use it.
Google Trends is another option that happens to be free, but it just lets you search a word and then tells you how many people have been searching that term over given amounts of time. It's not all together more helpful than the search engine alone. Now, there’s also another option, which is Ahrefs.com. This website is a SEO tool that offers you all of what we’ve talked about and more, but it is pretty pricey. The good thing is though, if you have time to dedicate to this particular need for your website, Ahrefs currently offers a free 7-day trial so if you prepare for it, and use it for what it is, you could wind up a pretty successful blogger. As it stands I keep postponing signing up for my free trial because I want to have a lot of keywords and websites at the ready for the research. Anyway, moving on, we’ve talked about how to find content to talk about, but now I want to talk about how important it is to write quality content, and that’s why I mentioned having an edge over your competition earlier. Creating content is not just about solving a problem. It’s about solving a problem better than someone else and getting the word out that you did it because blogging is not a one-and-done scenario. Good content can only get you so far if no one finds it. So make sure to keep all these things in mind on your next search and you may just have the makings of some great content.
Oh! & if you like this list of blog topic ideas be sure to Pin the article so you can come back to it later!