Connor Brooke
Some days, despite your best intentions and efforts, you find yourself staring at a blank screen wondering how you are going come up with a topic for your blog. Don’t worry, you are not alone. We go through that here too. We have a few secrets we’re willing to share that we know can help you quickly and easily create content for your blog on those days you are stuck.
The first two are easy ones:
- Read what other people write
- Make lists
The first one is something that any writer will recognize. The advice beginning writers in any profession receive is read other writers to learn how to write. Well, that same advice applies to blogging, though we would alter it a bit: read other bloggers to see what they are writing about. Follow bloggers in your industry. Look for hot topics in which you can add to the conversation. Remember, blog writing is about sharing educational, top of the funnel information.
As for list making, people love them. It’s an easily digestible way to present information and they are generally easy to compile: list of improvements, list of favorites, list of benefits your product or service delivers. You get the idea.
And you are about to get a list – a list of 10 other ideas that can help you quicly and easily create content for your blog. (I was asked by a friend the other day how I find ideas, and I was inspired by another blog I saw that listed 88 ideas. I thought I would combine the concepts.)
10 quick and easy ways to create content:
- Comments on your previous blog posts. If you’ve written a blog that sparked a lot of comments in the past, highlight those comments in a new post. It has a way of re-engaging your followers
- Unique uses for your product or service. Write about a way in which it’s been used that is different, fun, or innovative. See what your customers have done and highlight it
- Compile a list of newsletters, videos, websites, etc., from your industry that your followers will find helpful and interesting
- Use Google Alerts to deliver relevant headlines to your inbox and write a roundup post regularly. You can set your alerts based on industry keywords to keep you on topic
- Skim LinkedIn Groups in your niche for hot topics. This is a great source of ideas that many people don’t take advantage of
- Quotes. Find and list quotes from big players in your industry; try QuoteGarden.com or BrainyQuote.com for research, or setup a Google Alert for those specific people
- Compile your older posts and write summary posts linking readers to these older resources. If you’ve written a lot about LinkedIn, for example, create a summary of your best blogs on that topic with each headline as link to the older post
- Check out content creation sites such as Constant Content and see what others are writing about relevant to your industry. Take a hot topic from those sites and add your own expert commentary
- Repurpose video content by either transcribing and embedding in a post, or starting a new conversation about the video in a post. Too often, we don’t think about using the content we create for other outlets for our blog
- Use StumbledUpon. You can plug in a wide variety of topics and hit the stumble button. Each time you hit stumble, it will display new content related to your industry or interest. It can be a great way to find a new idea for your blog when you are really stuck
This is by no means is a definitive list, but it certainly is a good place to start when the clock is ticking and you are looking for a quick way to create a blog post that will be relevant to your followers and prospects. It’s helped us to generate more than 260 blog posts in the last calendar year.
For more content creation ideas, check out our tip sheet 13 Ways to Keep Your Blog Stocked With Great Content.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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Answer sites like Yahoo Answers are a good way to find questions to blog about related to your niche.
A great suggestion as well. Thanks, Gino. Appreciate the comments.
and work continuously on your blogs :)
i actually like your post …. you added some really useful points that i will now implement :)
Thanks.
Glad you found the post helpful. Thanks for commenting.