It happens to all of us at one point or another. You have empty slots on your editorial calendar and you need to fill them. However, your keyword research has been subpar lately and all the titles on your on-deck list are just okay. Naturally, if you’re not excited to create the content, your readers won’t be hyped to read it – so why bother? You clearly need some inspiration at this point. More importantly, you need some awesome unique blog post ideas and you need them yesterday. In this post, we’ll discuss how to generate new blog topics so that you’ll have a hard time figuring out which one you want to write next.
8 Tips & Tools to Generate New Blog Post Topics
There are times when keyword research just doesn’t cut it. Sometimes you want to discuss something that your audience wouldn’t even know to search for. Maybe you want to target a small segment of your audience. Heck, you may want to approach a traditional topic from a new angle. Here are a handful of techniques you and employ to craft more authentic content.
1.) Generate New Blog Post Topics with a Classic Brainstorm Session
I can’t speak on your behalf, but I don’t have a ton of spare time to generate new blog post topics. Why? I spend a ton of time each day in front of my computer for my 9 to 5 job (this blog is a passion project in case you didn’t know). When I’m not on a Microsoft Teams call or working with clients, I’m likely auditing websites, digging through Google Analytics, or replying to email correspondences.
My daily grind leaves little time to engage in my creative process. This is why brainstorming is a great first step toward creating unique blog post ideas. The best brainstorming sessions typically occur during collaborative gatherings where any and all ideas are fair game. This, in turn, allows for unique topics and non-traditional angles to surface.
2.) Scroll Through Your Socials to Generate New Blog Post Ideas
Social media is a great way to find out what your audience is talking about. The beauty of this method is that all it requires is for you to scroll through your social accounts on your phone or laptop. Let’s be real, we all spend too much time doing this already daily, so it should be a burden. You can check the major platforms – Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Other social platforms, such as Pinterest, Quora, and TikTok are also viable sources of inspiration.
You can check your tags and mentions to see what your followers are saying about you, and you can spend some time on your homepage scrolling through what the world is saying. If you want to craft even better, more unique ideas, you need to take things further.
You need to look at posts from industry thought leaders and review any industry hashtags. Regardless of the route you select, make sure you spend some time reviewing the comments, posts, and replies because user input is a great source of new blog post topics.
3.) Read Your Comments
Figuring out what your audience is talking about on social is great. However, identifying what exactly piques their interest via their comments on your blog is better. This is why it’s a great idea to check your comments section when you’re in need of inspiration. Scrolling through their comments on your posts allows you to identify what’s holding them back, what information they’re volunteering for about their methods, and much, much more. Sometimes, you can even develop a new blog post topic directly from a comment when a visitor airs their struggles.
So, the next time you’re in desperate need of a new blog topic, click over to the comments that visitors leave and see if there are any questions that you can answer. If your blog gets enough traffic, you can make this a regular practice and keep track of user questions and problems that you use as a launchpad for new blog post topics.
4.) Start with Your Personas
Another way to generate new blog post topics is to stop focusing on keywords and topics and start writing to meet the needs of your buyer personas. If you need a quick refresher, personas are marketing tools that help you connect with your ideal audience when crafting your marketing campaigns and material, this includes your content.
This may come as a shock, but the content you create for your personas often outperforms the content you draft from other angles for your brand. 58% of B2B marketers consider “audience relevance” as one of the premier factors in determining the success of content marketing.
The best way you can use your personas to generate fresh content ideas is to start with some simple, open-ended questions. Here are a few to get you started:
- What’s stressing out your persona? What’s the solution?
- What’s something your persona could spend less time doing? How?
- How does your persona need to prep for an upcoming holiday?
Remember, these are just starting points. You can get more specific about your products and offerings, too. So, pull out your personas and start thinking about what blog post each will want to read.
5.) Talk with Other Teams
This one is wicked simple but may require you to adjust your understanding of how to source blog topics. Your most interesting blog post ideas aren’t going to come from your marketing team. Yes. Re-read that if necessary. Instead, you need to engage with the teams who interact directly with your audience. This includes your sales and support teams primarily.
Your sales team knows your prospects inside and out. They spend countless hours learning about new leads, figuring out which content your top prospects are engaging with on your site, and spending a ton of time engaging with prospects in an intimate setting.
Your support team, on the other hand, spends a lot of time interacting with your current customers. To make things even sweeter, they hear all about what excites them and what worries them. Better yet, they engage with a massive pool of current customers, so you can easily differentiate between one-off problems and patterns of problems.
These patterns are nothing shy of pure gold for unique blog post ideas. So set up a series of meetings, draft some questions, and get ready to write some awesome blog posts.
6.) Jump on New Keywords
I realize that the primary focus of this article is how to generate new blog post topics without falling back on the standard keyword research methods that all content marketers employ. However, jumping on new keywords before they gain serious traction, or worse, peak and plummet, is an awesome way to find new ideas that still offer some organic traffic.
Keyword tools like Semrush and Ahrefs have views that feature recently discovered keywords related to your query. Most of the time, these suggestions won’t have a ton of organic searches, but this can signal a potential rising trend.
If you want to focus your efforts on new, trending keywords with some traffic, you need to check out Ryan Dean’s Exploding Topics resource. This weekly newsletter provides a list of topics that are on the verge of taking off. Furthermore, Brian includes in-depth expert insight and analysis that proves to be the icing on the cake.
Whether you subscribe to the tool or signup for the newsletter, Exploding Topics will help you identify fresh trending keywords before they’re mainstream. This head start provides you with ample opportunity to draft, revise and publish content surrounding the fresh blog post topic.
7.) Focus on Your Competition to Generate New Blog Post Topics
Innovation doesn’t always require a blank slate. Sometimes you can find unique ideas by exploring what’s already working for others. This is why focusing on your competitor’s content can serve as a great way to generate new blog topics.
You can employ Ahref’s Content Gap tool to identify your competition’s top-ranking keywords, which will lead you to their top-ranking content. Furthermore, the tool shows you what keywords one or more of your competitors are ranking for that you’re not.
Don’t have a keyword research tool? Don’t sweat it! You can do this the old fashion (aka manual) way, too. However, while your efforts may seem intense, your precision will be far less. Take a look at your competitor’s blog and see what they’re posting about. Next, think about how you can build on that and create content that’s even better.
8.) Use a Blog Post Idea Generator
Let’s face it, sometimes you’re in a rut and you can’t do any more digging into comments or social threads. Heck, your brainstorm tank even hits empty every now and then. This doesn’t mean you’re at a loss. You just need a tool to point you in the right direction and feed you a few blog post ideas.
This is exactly why blog topic generators exist.
Hubspot’s Blog Idea Generator is a great place to start. Hubspot’s tool lets you input up to five nouns and then it spits out five blog post ideas (it’ll provide more ideas if you share your contact info).
The structures are the same for the most part, so this isn’t a foolproof topic generator. But even if you don’t end up using the exact ideas, the structure of the topics can help you switch things up.
Closing Thoughts
There you go – eight ways to generate new blog post topics! Whether you’re struggling to fill your editorial calendar or just looking to mix things up and write some fun content, you can use these strategies to brainstorm new, out-of-the-box topics!
