How to Find New Content Ideas for Your Blog and Drive Traffic
You must publish thrilling content constantly to grow your blog. It requires interesting, trendy and intelligent ideas. So, how does one can come up with post ideas which people enjoy and want to share?
Speaking from my own experience, we are not always passionate. Sometimes passion runs low. You can not afford to sit and wait for inspiration to strike.
Here I’m going to share clever strategies on finding new content ideas for your blog. Use these tips to encourage new brain spark today and find fresh ideas for your blog. You will never get out of ideas again.
1. Search for Trending Topics in Your Niche
Google indexes millions of articles every day and it’s a safe bet that at least few of them have information regarding your business. You need to be aware of the latest happenings within your field.
Sign up for Google Alerts which allows you to add and remove alert topics anytime based on your interests.
Just add keywords relevant to your blogging goals and you’ll set updates on your email when this keyword is mentioned somewhere on the web. You might not come across these articles on your own.
For example, you may write about ‘social media marketing’, so Google Alert will notify you about news and trends in this niche every day:
Google Alerts deliver great content ideas to spark your creativity. Bedsides, this tool also can be used to find out when someone mention your name, your brand or blog around the web.
I’d like to share one more great tool from Google called Google Trends. Here you can search for any topic and figure out volume it’s receiving. To make results more targeted you can use country search or specific region search.
Keyhole is one more interesting service which works just like Google Alerts, but for social media sites. It tracks hashtags across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
You can insert a keyword and observe the topic in real time. This tool also can be used to monitor mentions of your brand on social media.
2. “Copy” What Worked Out for Others
I don’t mean to steal other people’s content. Stealing is not cool.
However, you can learn a lot from seeing what other bloggers from your niche publish and create your own unique posts on this base.
I really like Ahrefs for it which is a backlink analysis tool for SEO professionals. It has really simply intuitive dashboard with tons of various data. You can insert any site’s name and get a lot of useful information, for example, here I’m going to analyse Onextrapixel. Just add a site’s name and press Enter.
You can analyse any website using Site Explorer tool which has three awesome reports: best by links, best by shares and top pages by organic search. So click Site Explorer and then Best by shares.
This tab will show you Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, G+, Pinterest shares and likes the posts have and total number of likes. So, now you know what content resonate with people. You can use the same post ideas for your own blog to gain likes and shares.
However, usually the content people like and share is temporary popular. You can find out which content is Best by links. Such kind of content attract links, – the more backlinks you have the more chances to appear on Google’s top.
Unlike ‘Best by shares’ content which will bring you traffic just a certain period of time, this type of posts will bring traffic from search engines all the time.
Also, there is one more useful tab you can use to find new content ideas – it’s Top Pages. This tab shows which pages bring the most traffic from Google. The tool will tell you top keyword, traffic volume and position in Google of a particular post.
You can also expand each post to see more details, such as a list of keywords bringing traffic, position, volume and results.
So, you can choose a few blogs from your niche, find out which pages and posts bring a lot of traffic and which keywords are used there, and then write some similar posts on your blog.
Ahrefs is a paid tool, but they have 2-weeks free trial which is quite enough to create a posts plan for a few months ahead.
BuzzSumo app does almost the same. Using a domain name, it can tell you which content is the most shared on social media and which content have the most number of backlinks. This is an awesome technique to create a list of blog topics which people are already interested in.
3. Find Questions from People in Your Target Audience
There are several Q&A websites which you can use to find questions from your target audience: it’s Quora and Yahoo Answers. These sites contain questions and answers with facts, opinions and interesting stories from people all over the globe.
Just create your profile, choose your niche and read through popular questions and answers. The nature of both sites means that they are useful for beginners and PROs.
The questions and answers can be voted by users, so you can quickly find the Best Questions of Quora. You can read about specific topics, brands or businesses there.
The number of followers in open questions shows which topic is hot and required an answer in your next blog post.
4. Scan Social Media Sites and Online Communities
If you know your target audience, you most probably know where they hang online all the time. You can find out who are their influencers, who they follow on social media, what forums and communities they are involved in.
Twitter hardly needs an introduction. Twitter lists current trends on their homepage and profile pages. It’s one of the best ways to find out political and cultural news, and define the mood of a whole nation.
You can check global trends or country trends, and write a list of blog post titles on a base of these trends.
Reddit is one more popular site where people are having heated debates on many topics day by day. People vote or upvote the topics, so just one look at Reddit’s homepage can give you a good idea of what is trending at the moment.
There is one quick trick on how to find subreddits relevant to your blog’s subject. For example, if your niche is ‘web design’, then the subreddit you need is /r/web_design.
You can search within this subreddit (mark limit my search to /r/web_design) for some topics people what to know more about, for example, search for ‘how do you’. This way you’ll find some new topics for your blog within your niche, and then you can even share this post in this subreddit.
There are more communities and social media sites, I’ve shared just a few tricks with you here to give you an insight.
5. Find Influential Writers and Topics
Influence as the ability of a person to inspire action within a community is a powerful thing, that’s why to find new blog post ideas you need to know what influencers in your area write about.
In order to find influential writers, you can use ClearVoice.com. Just type a name of online writer, blog, site or topic and you’ll get a list of most influential authors and their posts. There is no need to sign up, just use your phone number and email address.
For example, let’s say you search for ‘content marketing’:
You’ll see the most prominent blogs, authors and topics to get inspiration from. It’s the quickest way to learn top names in any field.
One more tool I’d like to mention here is followerwonk by Moz.
With focus on Twitter exclusively, this free service provides a useful search engine for influencers in your niche along with tool for competitive comparisons.
An authority filter allows you to filter and sort influencers, and even save reports for future references. This is one more way to find influencers and figure out what they do and write.
6. Get Into the Habit of Taking Notes
As a blogger you need to develop a habit to take notes about almost everything interesting you see around the web. You can handwrite your ideas in a physical notebook or create an ideas file in Google Docs, or just a spreadsheet with a list of all blog ideas that come to your mind.
Keep this file in a place you can reach from anywhere, like Dropbox, Evernote or Trello boards. Do this each and every time you read some blog or a book, or just come up with an idea by chance.
Ideas for new blog posts can come and go in a flash, so make sure to capture them the way you like it. The simplest way to beat the writer’s block is a well-organized ideas doc. Take notes while you do your research using the methods described in this article and you’ll forget about creative block for good.
What to Do Next
It’s quite easy to find new ideas for blog post. The difficult part is to organize them the way you can begin acting. I hope this articles gives you some ideas on where to start out.
Now get yourself to work:
- Start making notes in a notebook, Google Doc or any other way you like. Keep taking notes every day and get back to it when you stuck again.
- Find out new hot trends in your niche.
- Find out what people from your industry write about.
- Start writing and don’t be afraid to push Publish button again. Some articles are going to be better than other. But some posts are better than nothing.
Do you have any creative methods to find new content ideas? Please share with us in the comment section below. And don’t be shy to help us spread this post around the web with your likes and shares.
