The rallying cry heard all around the SEO and content marketing world is that “content is king.”

But, generating new and engaging content on a regular basis can be exhausting, and all too often, it can feel as if the well of ideas has gone dry. No matter who you are, or how adept you are at creating unique and engaging blog posts, you’re going to find yourself facing that most dreaded of foes – the blank page.

You’ll scratch your head and ask yourself, “ What in the world am I going to write about now?” – although you may be tempted to phrase it more succinctly, and much more colorfully. Still, the search for blog topics must go on, so here are some useful tips to help content providers re-seed their well of ideas.

Take to The Twitter-verse

One of the best sources for topic ideas is Twitter. It’s where audiences of all industries spend a good portion of time and resources. It’s where they’re talking about the things that interest them.

For content marketers, Twitter is a rich mine of potential topics. Using Twitter’s search function, you can find out what is trending for any given keyword or phrase. Simply enter a keyword in the “Search Twitter” field and hit search. This will bring you a quick sampling of trending topics that include your keyword, and from this, you can see what people are talking about as regards your keyword choices.

You can also add a #help to the ‘these hashtags’ field to find Twitter comments concerning topics that users have questions and concerns about. This is especially useful when searching for blog topics because people are always interested in content that answers specific questions and offers solutions to specific problems.

Traditional keyword research is a boon for any webmaster or SEO, but it can only tell you what has happened in the past. When you’re desperately searching for blog topics, you want to know what is trending now. Google Trends does just that and can show you what search topics are getting the most action, and in real-time.

Search trends can be broken down into a number of different sub-groups, so you can see what trending topics are of particular interest to people in your industry. If you want to dig deeper, you can perform an individual keyword search, looking for trending news items, blog posts, and user searches that are directly related to your keyword.

Monitor Forums

Forums are a prime source of ideas for blog topics. Even with the rise of social networks, plenty of online users are still gathering in forums to discuss a wide variety of topics, both general and niche related. Using a listening tool, such as Google Alerts, you can monitor forum conversations looking for topics that might be exploited in your next blog post.

The most under-used forums for topic research are Quora and Reddit. Both platforms are having explosive growth as other social platforms are limiting certain speech in today’s times.

Get News Savvy

Keeping up with the daily news isn’t just smart, it’s a way to find topics and related content that can be spun off into blog gold.

Whether online or in print, news items can be a valuable jumping off point for a blog post. Obviously, articles that affect your industry directly are the prime sources of inspiration for your own online content, but basic news trends can also be put to use in finding topics to write about. Often referred to as “newsjacking”, this is simply a matter of learning to take trending news stories and finding interesting ways of relating them to your own niche industry. It should be noted that newsjacking takes some practice, and is not for the faint of heart.

In Conclusion

Yes, sooner or later everyone hits the content wall and finds themselves struggling to find topics for their next blog post. There’s plenty of inspiration to be had, and most of it’s right at your fingertips. Go where your readers go, and investigate the trending topics on forums, social media networks, and news feeds. Now, take a deep breath, pour yourself a cup of coffee, and start browsing for topics!

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