3 Simple Ways to Come up with New Blog Post Ideas

Published in

A Cup of Copy

7 min readJun 17, 2019

It sucks, doesn’t it?

You know how important it is to have tons of blog post ideas so you can consistently bring more traffic to your website, but your creativity is at a critical level and you need fresh topics to keep your momentum going.

So, you sit there thinking of new strategies to produce original topics, but you feel like everything had already been written on the web.

It happens.

I’ve been writing web content since 2011 and this is one of the challenges that I needed to figure out. After all, part of the job is to keep my employers and clients’ content interesting, useful, and original.

I would constantly look for new ways to come up with blog topics that will bring value and new insights to my target readers.

And here’s what I learned — you just need a list of effective strategies to fall back on whenever you run out of blog ideas.

In this post, I’m sharing three of my top research strategies that I’ve picked up over the years.

Let’s dive in!

1. Use a blog idea generator

The easiest and fastest way to come up with new blog topics without using much brain power is to use a blog idea generator.

If you’ve been writing on the web for some time now, you’ve probably come across one. But, just in case you haven’t given it a try, my favorite is the HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator.

For this example, I want to see suggestions around the topic of content marketing and my nouns are ‘content marketing’, ‘writing’, and ‘secrets’.

You’ll notice that not all generated ideas are usable. Some of them are nonsense. Something you can expect if you’re using automated tools like such, but with a little bit of creativity, you can turn the suggestions into really good ones.

With a little bit of editing, I was able to come up with the following headlines:

How to solve weak website traffic with content marketing
5 apps everyone in the writing industry should be using
15 best blogs to follow about content marketing
14 common misconceptions about content marketing
10 signs you should invest in content marketing

Other blog topic generators that I also recommend:

2. Break down a published book

Books are a great source of killer blog post ideas, if you know where and how to look. I mean there are millions of published books out there. It’s overwhelming.

But, if you follow my simple guideline, you’ll be amazed that there’s a bunch of interesting topics out there waiting to be noticed and written.

Step 1: Niche down

Trust me when I say that a lot of good topics are hidden in niche Kindle books.

And for the purpose of this guide, let’s say I want to create a month’s worth of blog ideas around the topic of content marketing.

Now, ‘content marketing’ is a broad topic by itself. The exact term yields over 1,000 results in Kindle Store. So, what I did is I chose a smaller topic that will still fall under it. In my case, I want to create educational content for blogging newbies, so I went with ‘blogging for beginners’.

Step 2: Search Kindle Store

In March 2018, there are over six million titles available in the U.S. alone. It’s crazy how fast Kindle publishing had grown since it launched in 2007!

Fortunately, we already picked a niche and a key phrase that will hopefully give us better results. True enough, ‘blogging for beginners’ generated a small number of results — 751 books.

Step 3: Create a list and keep it short

The next step is to vet the results and create a short list.

You want to be as efficient as possible in sifting through these books. Five high-quality niche books are ideal to start with. To do this, look for authors you are familiar with or focus on books that have 4–5 stars rating, and choose the most relevant titles.

Start with your top choice and proceed to vet the author’s legitimacy by doing a quick google search. If the author maintains a website and active social media accounts, there’s a high chance that you’re reading the words of a real person.

A word of caution: not all self-publishers on Kindle are legit. Do your research.

Step 4: Analyze the chapters

Next, click the thumbnail of your first eBook. Kindle Store gives you the opportunity to read the first couple of pages to get a feel of the content.

I chose to review a book called ‘My Blogging Secrets: A guide to becoming a pro-blogger’. It’s written by Amber MacNaught, a popular UK blogger.

Here are the chapters of the eBook:

Step 5: Draw out blog post ideas

From the Table of Contents or Chapters, extract feasible ideas and make them your own.

From these chapters, I was able to come up with the following headlines:

5 free tools to create images for your blog
The only blogging guide you’ll ever need
The main reason why you need to blog for your business
8 ways to get people to read your blog
22 ideas on how to monetize your blog

In less than three minutes, I’ve come up with 5 blog post titles that are good enough for one month if I blog once a week. But, if you’re an enterprise that posts more than once a week or a daily blog that publishes once a day, you just need to repeat step 3 and 4 a few times more.

Note: Steal ideas but don’t copy. That’s plagiarism and copyright infringement has serious consequences.

3. Address customer pain points

A pain point is basically a problem. Plain and simple.

If you think about it, businesses are built to address pain points that their customers are experiencing. And I’m willing to bet that your products and services were developed because you identified a customer pain point and shaped your offerings to solve it.

For me, the most effective blog posts I’ve read on the internet are the ones that aim to solve customer pain points. If you’ve been running your business for a while, you probably have an idea of what your customers struggle with. If not, here are two ways to help you uncover these.

Tip #1: Ask your existing customers

It’s the easiest way to know where your customers are hurting.

For example, if you offer social media marketing services for book authors, you might ask your existing customers:

What problems do you face in terms of increasing book sales?
How do you establish authority online as a subject matter expert?
What is your biggest challenge when promoting the launch of your book?

Tip #2: What pain points do your competitors focus on?

Customer problems are diverse and they can evolve over time. One way to check is to look at your competitor website and see which problems they are most focused on. What benefits are they selling? What problems do they promise to solve?

Create a list and use your best judgment to filter out pain points that are not relevant to your business and use these to create useful content.

How to write headlines based on customer pain points

Now that you have a list, you’re ready to craft catchy headlines.

For example:

SMM, a company that offers social media marketing services for book authors, found out that their customers are struggling the most on how to drive website traffic to their sales pages. Your key phrase is ‘website traffic’ for this specific pain point and you can create dozens of headline base on this term alone.

5 social media tips to drive traffic to your book’s sales page
How to use Facebook Ads to 10x your website traffic
5 website traffic boosting tips using Pinteres

Transforming pain into content is one of the best blog writing strategies out there because it speaks directly to your customer about a pressing problem that may be costing them precious time and money.

Over to you! Is there a topic you want me to cover next? Comment below. I’d love to hear your suggestions.