How to find blog topics

Blogging is great for SEO and to demonstrate your expertise to potential new clients. But it can often be a challenge to come up with new and interesting topics to write about.

Maybe you came up with a list of topics when you started blogging, but you’re almost done with the list. Or maybe you’re just starting out and you don’t even have a list yet. It’s time for some brainstorming! But the process of coming up with new topics can feel like an uphill struggle.

Here are six different ways to find blog topics when the going gets tough.

1. Ask your audience

Literally ask subscribers, clients, and friends what they would like to read about.

Before asking, consider how you will ask them. Will you suggest a few broad topics? Will you email your newsletter subscribers, post on Facebook, or email individuals directly?

Maybe you’ve already been hearing some of the same questions every time you talk to new or potential clients. Those can make great blog topics too!

2. Revisit the past

It may sound counterintuitive to rewrite old blog articles when you want new ones. But updating older blog articles is actually a great tactic! Everything is evolving and changing over time, so your blogs should too!

Look through your current blog catalog and see what you need to revisit. Are there posts that are popular but a few years old? Are there any that would take just a little work to update?

Blog comments can be helpful as well. Sometimes readers will comment with great questions that you can incorporate in a new version of the blog article.

3. SEO research with Wordtracker

Wordtracker.com is a great resource to see what terms people are searching for. It has both a free version and a paid version. Here at T&S, we use the paid version for our clients, but the free version will likely be enough for you.

It lets you enter a seed keyword, then gives you related words that people are using in searches. The list includes how often that word and similar words and phrases are being searched, as well as the competition for those terms.

4. SEO research with AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is another great SEO research tool that can help you come up with blog topics. Type in your word or phrase and watch their engine pull up a list of actual questions people are searching for on the internet.

Just like Wordtracker.com, this tool has a free version and a paid version. While our team uses the paid version, the free version will be enough for most organizations.

There will be a list of who, what, where, when, why, and how questions with potentially dozens of phrases in each section. It will also show a list of alphabetized key words that were paired with your initial key word search.

5. Blog a Week book

Our own Pretty Cool Boss Man, Tim Priebe, actually wrote a book on how to create a year worth of weekly blog topic ideas. They’re suitable for any organization that wants to blog. While they’re structured around your first year of blogging, many of our clients use the ideas in the book for years and years.

You can download a free preview on the official Blog a Week website.

6. 101 blog topic recipes ebook

A couple years back we released a free ebook, 101 blog topic recipes. While Tim’s Blog a Week book goes into detail on how to come up with each topic, this is more of a quick reference source.

In this ebook, you’ll get recipes relate to activities, problems, products & services, secrets & resources, someone else, and your business & industry. Best of all, it’s a fill in the blank list where you just add words specific to your industry or organization!

And there you go! Now you should never suffer from writer’s block again. And when you do write your blogs, don’t forget to tell people about them! Make sure you have some sort of Blog Delivery System.

If this still sounds like too much work, we do provide blogging services and would be happy to talk to see if that would be a good fit for you or not.