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How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas

Do you struggle with how to come up with blog post ideas on a consistent basis?

In this post, we will give you all the best tips on how to have a regular content schedule that will never leave you wondering what topic to write about next.

Coming up in this post:

  1. Strategy 1: Find what’s already published
    1. Step 1: What do your readers want to know?
    2. Step 2: Look at table of contents in books of your topics
  2. Strategy 2: Work from your list of high ranking keywords
    1. Step 1: Create your list of topics that you want to rank high in keywords
    2. Step 2: Use a keyword ideas tool
    3. Step 3: Complete an ‘All in Title’ Google Search
    4. Step 4: To ensure you are the highest ranking post, use a word count on existing competitor posts
  3. Strategy 3: Answer searches around your topic
    1. Option 1: Use a purpose built tool to find questions around your keyword
    2. Option 2: Use Google Search frequently asked questions to see the most popular searches around your keyword
  4. Strategy 4: Write sub topics on your highest ranking topics
    1. Pillar content
  5. Strategy 5: Rewrite and update your old content
  6. Happy writing!

Strategy 1: Find what’s already published

Step 1: What do your readers want to know?

The first thing that you may already know is that you need to be creating content for your audience. Don’t write about topics that you enjoy, or topics that you’d like on your blog. You need to think about content that is helpful and suitable to your audience.

For example, we work with startup businesses graduating from the Alacrity Foundation. Our goal is to provide them support and advice to help them flourish into successful businesses.

So our blog audience is primarily for tech companies in the startup world. We focus our blog content on providing marketing tips to new businesses.

Once you’ve established who you are writing for and the type of information you want to provide, the next steps get easier!

Step 2: Look at table of contents in books of your topics

Neil Patel has a great strategy of using Amazon Books ‘Look Inside’ feature to create a list of blog topics. It takes much of the hard work out of learning how to come up with blog post ideas.

In this strategy, Neil looks at the table of contents from published books. He then suggests using all or some of the chapter topics as blog post ideas.

How to do this:

  1. Go onto Amazon Look Inside
  2. Type in your topic area into the search box
  3. Select any of the book results and click the ‘Look inside’ tab
  4. This will usually show the table of contents; from which you have a new list of topic ideas to choose from!
How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas - Amazon Contents
How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas – Amazon Contents

We think this strategy is genius, as it’s a super easy strategy that takes up little of your time, and you’ll never be stuck for thinking about blog topics.

Tip 1: Write your own thoughts and perspective

Try to write down your own ideas and thoughts on the subject title before you read any information in detail. This will give you a fresh perspective and you won’t be too heavily influenced by the published book. Which in turn minimises accidental plagiarism.

Tip 2: Add to your ideas from lots of varied content:

On the back of using this strategy, type in each of the new blog ideas into Google and use a range of work to give you varied opinions on the subject to add to your own thoughts. This way you’ll have a detailed and rich answer on the topic. Something that Google favours immensely and will prioritise you in search engine results. You can find out more about how to rank high in Google results in this blog post: How to Increase SEO Through a High-Quality Website.

Strategy 2: Work from your list of high ranking keywords

We have written extensively on how to do this in a detailed step-by-step process in this blog post: How to Improve Keyword Ranking in Google.

But, we will give you a simplified overview on how to create your blog post ideas list here anyway.

The process is simple but it can be time consuming. The advantages of using this method is that

  1. You’ll get super high ranking keywords in advance.
  2. Once your list is completed, you won’t need to research your keywords before each topic you write.

Step 1: Create your list of topics that you want to rank high in keywords

For example, one of our technology startups Reliving run a digital time capsule app that also allows you to track your genealogy, diary writing, interview recording, store digital media and create a forward facing life story for you and your family. This app suits a huge range of audiences for who they focus their blog posts around.
On their blog you’ll find topics for genealogy, biography, dementia, goal planning and diary writing.

They have implemented this keyword ranking strategy for blog post ideas, and are working through their highest ranking keywords list for this range of blog topics.

Step 2: Use a keyword ideas tool

Once you have your main ideas for keywords, you want to complete a search to check your chosen keywords are actually keywords that get searched each month. To do this you’ll need to run your keywords through a keyword tool to see the search, competition and cost statistics.

Since the monetisation of Keywords Everywhere we have now switched to Ubersuggest to search for keyword statistics for free. For more free keyword search tools read this post: Free Tools for Keyword Search & Alternatives to Keywords Everywhere!

Step 3: Complete an ‘All in Title’ Google Search

As you’re competing with other website’s content for that top ranking position on Google, you need to make sure that you have richer content than other posts with the same keyword title.

  1. To do this type into Google ‘Allintitle:’ with your keyword. This will bring up all posts with your keyword in the title.
  2. Select all the content on the first page and make sure you cover all the topics they write about and more. This will tell Google that your content richer in value, and will provide more information to users.

Step 4: To ensure you are the highest ranking post, use a word count on existing competitor posts

To get another advantage over your competition run a word count on each of these competing posts (from the previous step), and make sure you have the highest word count.

For a more detailed process on how to use this strategy read this blog post: How to Improve Keyword Ranking in Google.

Strategy 3: Answer searches around your topic

Another great way to expand on your blog post ideas is to find out what users are interested in. to do this you need to see how web surfers are using your keyword in their searches.

Option 1: Use a purpose built tool to find questions around your keyword.

A great tool designed for this exact purpose is Answer the Public. Not only is the website pretty cool, but it’s powered by Google’s auto- suggest which combines your keyword with questions. These questions involve the words ‘who, how, why, where, what, which, when and are.’

You can also select to find out prepositions around your keyword too, this involves phrases with the words ‘is, can, for, near, to, with, without.’

How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas - Prepositions Answer the Public
How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas – Prepositions Answer the Public

1
From this you can save the search and come back to your list of questions to select blog topics to write about.

The positives of using this method are that the questions are generated from actual Google searches by users. So you will be directly writing to answer genuine questions. If written well, and ticking all the SEO boxes, your blog post should be prioritised by Google for any future searches regarding your topic.

Option 2: Use Google Search frequently asked questions to see the most popular searches around your keyword.

Instead of using a specific tool to generate questions or popular searches you could just use Google search bar directly. This is a fast way to see how searches are using your keyword. The downside is that you can’t export all the results and save for future use.

How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas - Google Search
How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas
– Google Search

Strategy 4: Write sub topics on your highest ranking topics

Pillar content

Once you have found your main topics to write about, this gives you an opportunity to branch off and write sub topics around each main category.

This type of blog structuring strategy is referred to as Pillar Content and Topic Clusters.

Writing pillar content also improves internal linking and site structure, which enhances the user experience. Internal linking and a high UX boosts your overall Google Ranking.

For more information on how to find out how to write pillar content read our post here: How to Create a Pillar Content Marketing Strategy.

How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas - Pillar content
How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas – Pillar content

Strategy 5: Rewrite and update your old content

While this isn’t a ‘blog post idea’ it does present an opportunity for you to go back over your catalogue of work and make sure it’s all relevant and correct.

Having old content that isn’t relevant to your topics can actually harm your SEO rating. It is better to cull any topics that don’t fall in line with your pillar content and main keywords.

Irrelevant content is confusing to Google, and will result in your website being penalised. It is much better to have fewer blog posts that are all consistent and harmonious with your keywords and topics, than to have a large blog catalogue that sends mixed messages about what you do.

Happy Writing!

We hope that the above strategies to think of new blog post topics enables you to create a content calendar that fills the next year!

If you have any different strategies on how to come up with blog post ideas, please let us know and share your methods in the comments below.

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