How and Where to Get Ideas & Inspiration for Your Next Blog Post

Creating a blog post is all about putting your work out there for people to read and enjoy. To achieve this, you need to constantly come up with ideas that will look & sound pleasing, but you may wonder whether anyone will read your work or if it is even worth publishing. Every blog writer has been there – don’t panic!

So, how do you come up with new ideas for your next blog post? Read on, and all will be revealed.

Store your ideas

Inspiration is one of those things that happens whenever it wants to happen. You cannot control it, as it strikes when you least expect it. However, keep a record of the ideas that come from your inspiration and store it in some accessible place. If you do this every time you have an idea, you will eventually have a decent record of post ideas that you can refer to.

Learn from others

Take a look at other blogs in your industry to gain inspiration. You can use a feed reader to bring all the blogs that are relevant to you together.

Go to popular sites in your niche and check what has been written there. If you are a social media reader, you may want to check out sites like Social Media Examiner, Forbes, Inc and Social Media Today.

Then, note down potential topics and titles.

Let ideas come to you

If you happen to have a good number of regular readers, you can use your audience to give you ideas about what you could write. Check social media to see what people are posting and listen to the questions that they are asking. Start a discussion to see what readers like about your work and what they would like to see more of.

Build on older content

If you look through your analytics history, it will give you an idea of the topics that your readers loved. Long after they have been published, successful posts will still draw in new readers.

Ensure to refresh your older blog posts if you happen to have new or updated information.

What is trending?

It is relatively easy to find out what is actually trending at this very moment in time. If you can understand the trends, then it will enable you to create highly relevant content. Make use of Google Trends to find out current and historical topic trends.

Tools like BuzzSumo will provide you with the best performing content based on a keyword or URL, as well as the backlink analysis for each post.

Link analysis

What works well for others could just as well work for you, and so finding out what posts are popular on any site is relatively easy, as the link analysis is readily available.

Use tools like Open Site Explorer to analyse how many inbound links does a specific URL has.

Idea Training

Coming up with ideas on a regular basis is something that you have to build on. The more you think of ideas, the easier it is to think of new ideas in the future. Thinking of blog post ideas every day will help it come more naturally to you.

So where do you go from here?

Everyone can come up with ideas of some sort for blog posts. The tricky thing about it is the actual execution.

So, now you need to get yourself started. Create your thoughts file, whether that is a word document or a spreadsheet, and populate it whenever something pops into your mind. Whenever you find yourself stuck for inspiration, open up the idea file and become inspired once again.

Think about those people in your industry who blog and take a look at what they are writing. Use their thoughts and topics, and expand on them.