Since it’s a blog that you’re launching here, it’s hard to imagine it without a regular stream of quality posts, right? That’s why you need some good blog content ideas.
This is chapter 7 of a bigger guide on how to start a successful blog.
JUMP TO CHAPTER:
- How to Start a Blog
- Chapter 1: Deciding What to Blog About
- Chapter 2: Choosing the Best Blogging Platform
- Chapter 3: Setting Up a Domain Name, Hosting & WordPress
- Chapter 4: Your Must-Have WordPress Plugins
- Chapter 5: The Basic Settings That Every Blog Needs
- Chapter 6: Blog Homepage and Other Essential Blog Pages
- Chapter 7: Coming Up With Blog Content Ideas That People Can’t Ignore
- Chapter 8: How to Write a Blog Post – Step by Step
- Chapter 9: WordPress SEO – Where to Start
- Chapter 10: How to Promote Your Blog
- Chapter 11: How to Monetize Your Blog
Well, yes, of course. But that’s also where the problems start.
The challenge is this:
How do you actually come up with good blog content ideas and on a regular basis?
Do you have to turn yourself into an unnaturally creative person who always has a stream of never-ending ideas up their sleeve? Do you gain these superpowers by getting bitten by a radioactive blogger?
No. Far from it.
The only real skill that you must train yourself in is the skill of paying attention.
Coming up with good blog content ideas isn’t really about sitting locked in a cave somewhere and writing pages upon pages of headline ideas, relying only on your own creativity. To the contrary.
To come up with stellar blog content ideas, you need to pay attention to what’s going on in your niche, and then act accordingly whenever you notice a “content hole” that needs to be filled.
Good blog content ideas rule #1:
Like I said above, it only makes sense to write/blog about stuff that people are already searching for.
In other words (and it may sound brutal, sorry), it doesn’t matter what you want to write about. What matters is what your audience wants to read about.
Why is that the case?
Well, new blogs have a big obstacle to overcome.
It’s an obvious obstacle, but a very serious one. What’s worse, many blogs never manage to get over it…
That obstacle is the fact that on day one nobody knows that your blog exists. Hence, nobody is going to read it.
So with that, if you decide to only write about your unique, never-before-contemplated ideas, people will never discover your blog.
On the other hand, if you decide to go the other way, and instead do your research right – finding out what actual challenges people face in your niche – and then describe your solutions to those challenges, you’re effectively 10x-ing your likelihood of getting found.
These days, Google is how most blogs get their traffic (then Facebook, data says). So for you to ever have a chance of getting discovered, your content needs to tackle the problems that people are googling actively. As simple as that.
Now, the best part:
📕 How to find out what your audience wants to read
There are two distinct schools of thought here:
- Going competition-first
- Going audience-first
The former is about sniffing around and trying to discover what your competition is doing and what sort of content works best for them.
In other words, what your competition blogs about = what you should blog about.
The way you’re going to discover this is via keywords.
Keywords are what fuels Google searches. People search using keywords. Your competition creates content that tackles given keywords in hope that their content will be displayed whenever someone searches for those keywords.
What you need to do is insert yourself in the middle of that picture.
Find what specific keywords your competitors use, examine their posts, and then write something better.
Here are the top tools you can use to discover what those keywords are:
Look for your competitors’ best content and make a list of those posts. Think on how you can write something that tackles the same keywords but is even better. Those are the topics worth writing about in the competition-first approach.
Going audience-first is an entirely different animal.
Quora is a questions and answers website. As in, people ask questions (there are no limitations; if someone has a question, they can ask it), and other people submit their best answers. Then the community votes on who answered best.
But setting this core purpose of Quora’s aside, it’s also one of the very few places where you can find out what people really want to learn.
Every question you see there that is related to your niche and the topic of your blog is a great opportunity to write a new blog post about.
Here’s why:
- Those are actual real people asking those questions, which means that whatever the topic of the question is, it is something that someone needs help with but hasn’t been able to find a solution to yet.
- You can take that exact question, and write a blog post that’s all about providing an answer. Then, you can publish an excerpt of that post as your answer directly on Quora and link back to your post for more (great tool for promotion).
To get started, start following all the topics on Quora that are relevant to your niche. Whenever some interesting question pops up, note it down and add it to your list of blog post ideas.
Another thing you can do apart from binging Quora is go back to your competitors’ blogs, but now for an entirely different reason:
Go back to those popular posts of theirs again, but this time scroll down to the comments section and note down any interesting questions that people ask in those comments. You will likely find a couple of gems that way as well.
In the end, your list of possible blog content ideas doesn’t have to be huge. In fact, it’s probably better to keep it short, just not to let any interesting idea slip by. I’d say that ten ideas is a good start.
Summing things up:
- Look up what your competition is doing. See through their content, the keywords they tackle, what’s popular on their sites. Make a list of those ideas that you want to cover as well.
- Look through the questions people ask on Quora. See if you can answer some of them in new blog posts.
- Look through the comments on your competitors’ blogs. See if any of them could be the basis for new blog posts.
- Compile a list of ten blog post ideas to start with.
📚 Further reading
- 21 unique blog post ideas to skyrocket your blog’s traffic – an easily-digestible list of interesting tactics you can use if you’re still staring at a blank piece of paper.
- How to get unlimited, sure-to-work blog post ideas in a non-obvious way – another take on the topic (involves working with your audience directly – good stuff!)