Blog Ideas: How to Get Inspiration for Posts
Are you struggling with finding topics to write about for your blog posts? Don’t worry, it happens to all of us eventually after we enter the world of online writing. Even the greatest and most successful blog writers sometimes run into walls where they can’t seem to find inspiration for upcoming blog posts. That’s why in this article, I’ll be sharing some of the most popular and effective ways anybody who writes for blogs can find inspiration for their posts, and ways anyone can get out of inspiration ruts we might come across.
In this article, we’ll be discussing:
Your Personal Skills and Experience
A great source of writing inspiration can come from the resource you should know the most thoroughly: yourself. At any time, you can draw on yourself, your personal skills, and/or your areas of expertise to find topics you can discuss in blog posts. What’s more, since you should know yourself and your specialties the best, all you’ll need to do to “research” how you’ll discuss a topic or several topics in your blog post is to just think a little deeper about what you do, what you know, what you’ve experienced, etc. Consider sharing your insights on a topic you know with near-complete familiarity, as a show of your professionalism and experience. Or you could answer common questions you encounter when working or growing your knowledge in a certain area or field. Never underestimate your potential to be a strong starting foundation for an intriguing and standout blog post!
Additionally, if the skills and experiences you write about are specific to just you, this means you can offer unique perspectives and insights into topics that other blog post writers wouldn’t be able to. This can help you set yourself apart from the competition, and stand out more to your readers as a blog poster that they should pay attention to.
Share Your Knowledge, Insights, and Experience
As an example, imagine yourself as the owner of a cooking school after a decade-long career working in the culinary industry. After so long in your line of work, you must have gained a lot of experience, expertise, and insights into different areas surrounding cooking, meal preparation, running a kitchen, utensil maintenance, and more. Your ability to open and operate a cooking school also speaks for the skills you’ve gained throughout your career. If you were to write a blog to attract site visitors and to promote your cooking school, you could draw on your experience and expertise to find and write about unique topics that would earn you interest and support from readers. For example, your topics could include things like food safety advice, tips to streamline your cooking experience, how to add restaurant-tasting flavor to your home-cooked dishes, and more.
Look at Trending Online Topics
Being able to look at big trends in what’s talked about and asked online is a huge asset to covering relevant and interesting topics with your blog posts. This is why resources like Google Trends, Answer the Public, and Keyword Tool can be fantastic assets to draw on when searching for popular topics to cover. These 3 resources are services that let you see what search terms are popular in different locations, demographics, online platforms, and more. When you’re able to see and understand this kind of information, you’re sure to be able to come up with different topics to appeal to and write about. Topics that people organically express interest in will likely be topics that they want to read more about; this is where you come in with your articles and intrigue readers to take a look at your content. When you know what topics catch people’s attention, you’ll have strong guidance for what to research and create content about, which can lead you to write successful blog posts that align with what your readers would want to see.
Keep Up With What’s Popular
To continue with our example from earlier, let’s say you’re the owner of a culinary school. To promote your school, you operate a blog where you post cooking-related articles. To get some ideas for what to write about on your blog, and to attract readers interested in learning more about cooking from you, you could go on Keyword Tool to look up phrases like “good dishes” and “dishes with”, then see what words and ingredients come after these phrases, to identify what foods many people are interested in making. From here, you could write articles or formulate recipes to share with readers based on the popular results you’ve found on Keyword Tool. This would earn you and your site interest from many new readers, who would come for the recipes and stay for the rest of the culinary-related knowledge that you share on your blog.
This is an example of Google Trends being used to see the popularity of phrases related to guest posting. You can see that even slight variations in how a phrase is typed can have a big impact on its relative popularity. No matter the content your blog covers, you can use information like this to understand what phrases people look for, and think about how you can write your content to align with what people are curious about.
Consider Other Outlets’ Content
If you’re looking for ideas to cover, why not look and learn from the countless other outlets, publications, and blogs out there? With millions of blog and content sites out there online, you’re sure to find some that have some topic overlap with what your blog covers. From here, you can take a look at the topics they cover to get a sense of what similar yet different blogs are doing compared to you and what you’re doing. After looking at the content of other blogs, you might have a better idea of what topics blogs cover, and beyond this, the performances of posts that cover different topics. Do some posts clearly show more reader engagement than others? Are some topics for posts widespread no matter what blog you end up on? These factors would indicate that writing articles about these topics in question bring in worthwhile amounts of readers and traffic, meaning it could be worthwhile for you to cover the same topics with your own blog.
You can also look at the formats and methods that these other sites use to share their content with their readers. Do they write list articles (listicles), how-to guides, in-depth discussions, or any other format of written blog content? Take a look at how they write their articles, and learn from their successes to see how your blog articles could succeed too. However, the key caveat to this advice is that even when you’re looking to other outlets and blogs for inspiration, you should always inject some of your own insights into the contents of your final product. This ensures that your content remains strictly your own original work, an important part of your integrity as an online content writer.
Get Inspired, Make It Your Own
Here’s an example of how you could take inspiration from other outlets. Continuing with our example of you being a culinary school owner that runs a cooking-related blog, let’s say you’re looking for ways to improve your blog to attract new audiences to it. If you’re unsure about whether your current format of sharing recipes is the most ideal way to do it, take a look at what other cooking-related blogs have been doing. What if many have recently been posting recipes in a format that’s relatively similar to one another, and comments on the post express how readers enjoy this new way of formatting recipe-sharing? You can take this into account and adapt a new format to your recipe posts similar to this new format you’ve seen on other blogs. This way, you’re incorporating improvements that others have made to their blogs into the way your own blog runs, which should earn your blog better results over time and help you keep up with any competition for readers’ attention out there.
Discuss Recent Events and Developments
It often pays off to keep up with the news and current events surrounding topics that your blog covers. That’s because you can use new changes and developments of interest as inspiration for your blog content. Take a look at other blogs similar to yours, large-scale news sites, official updates from companies and groups relevant to your blog’s covered topics, and more. Maybe your blog shares advice and insights about a certain topic or field, and a notable company in the same or related field has just announced a new project that’s attracting a lot of attention. Maybe a newly-released product relevant to your blog is making waves among communities online. If there’s ample buzz and interest in this topic, you could contribute to and receive traffic from these general sentiments as well.
New Developments, New Topics
Let’s apply this method to a clear tangible example. Say you’re still the culinary school owner who runs a culinary-related blog. Recently a brand of cookware marketed for innovative new design features and functionality has become wildly popular, has been talked about widely online, and is selling out constantly both in stores and online. With your blog surrounding cooking and tools used that are related to making food, you could, for example, make a blog post sharing your thoughts on the functionality of the cookware from your experience, and how you think the brand cookware’s special features compare to other cookware of the same type. As another example, you could make a post about how you think this cookware’s different functionality will let it play a bigger role in someone’s preparation of specific dishes. When you stay aware of recent events that would concern your blog and your readers, you can find a wealth of inspiration for your blog.
Share your own thoughts and opinions, offer a unique interpretation of these developments that nobody else seems to have covered yet, or take any other approach that suits you and your blog. You can attract audiences towards your blog that are interested in hearing different opinions about the new topic that’s intrigued them. What matters is you use recent developments as the foundation of what you write, so that your blog post succeeds and attracts interested readers.
Closing Thoughts
The possibilities for topics are endless when you find the right sources for inspiration. From yourself to trends around you, and everything in between, your blog posts can get launched from the simplest or most unsuspecting of places. Take a look around yourself, what your blog covers, what’s popular with others online, and anywhere else that would be relevant to your articles, and find what will bring your articles success.
The power of blogs in reaching potential clients for any sort of business should never be overlooked. That’s why I believe that any individual or business with real ambitions for establishing an online presence to earn themselves more attention should always consider opening a website and, if their time and resources allow for it, creating content for their online presence to attract more eyes to their operations. To get yourself off to a strong start I’d recommend you get started with a site builder that’s simple, straightforward to use, and flexible. This is why I’d recommend you try using Website.com’s Site Builder, which worked great for me when I was looking to build a professional-looking yet straightforward site. Give it a try and see how you like the process of constructing a website using shockingly simple drag-and-drop functionality.