Guest post by Ann Smarty.
One of the biggest challenges many bloggers face, at some point, is consistently coming up with new and interesting topics to write about.
Image credit: Ivan Samkov on Pexels
Writer’s block is real. If you haven’t faced it yet, it’s likely you haven’t been blogging for too long.
Traffic fluctuations, rejection, and failures contribute to the burnout, especially at this stage where Internet content is growing exponentially.
Standing out is difficult, so having a constant flow of original content ideas is key. You need to keep finding inspiration. Here are six sources and tactics to discover promising new blog content ideas.
Read (and Make Friends with) Relevant Bloggers
This is not so much for ideas (you can’t simply steal other topics from other writers) but rather to keep yourself motivated. It’s helpful to be part of a community to interact with other writers, see what they are doing and help them promote their content.
Collaboration is vital for success as a blogger, whether you do work on Youtube or in WordPress. It applies to all types of blogging: it’s helpful to make connections in your business segment or topic niche and find ways to help one another.
There’s no really competition in blogging. I haven’t felt as though I’ve competed with any other blogger in my 20 years of blogging. Forget the concept of competition.
It is about being helpful to be helped. Serendipity is my favorite concept in blogging. You find luck by simply opening yourself to interactions with other people, every single day.
I have also found it to be the best way to keep yourself motivated and inspired, because you have likeminded people to share your success with and to be encouraged by.
Keep an Eye on Keywords
With so much public data available through social media, researching what’s hot and what’s not is relatively simple (though not easy). There are plenty of tools (many free) you can use to explore topics, trends, and keywords.
The following are tools that will help you research top-notch topics that receive a lot of social engagement. Use these tools and strategies to determine what topics would be a good fit for your own blog as well as topics to contribute to other blogs as guest posts. Note that you shouldn’t steal topic ideas verbatim, but find ways to take a popular topic and make it unique.
Buzzsumo helps you find highly engaging articles on any topic. You can filter results by recency, publication type, domain (i.e. your fellow blogger) and author. You can also see articles written by journalists or everyone. The “Evergreen” score represents each article’s ability to generate social media shares and backlinks over time:
VidIQ offers Youtube-focused AI-driven keyword research tool. It includes search volume metric representing the popularity of each term on Youtube (it is not clear how VidIQ calculates it but I found this pretty cool!)
Answer The Public and Also Asked are two great freemium tools to research relevant questions to answer in your content.
Subscribe to Industry Blogs with Feedly
Feedly is a web-based RSS reader that allows you to not only keep up to date with the latest posts from blogs in your industry but also uses AI to filter the most relevant articles to save you time.
If you want to keep a list of topic ideas based on what you find in Feedly, you can use the bookmark option to save the most popular posts you find.
This provides you with a topic inspiration database to choose from. Best of all, you can do this research on your mobile device as well with the Feedly iPhone, iPad, Android, and Kindle apps.
Feedly also offers powerful AI integration. With it, you don’t have to add your own feeds; you specify the topics of your interest and its AI algorithm with gather and summarize latest updates for you.
You can combine keywords to track several topics or specific an angle. For example, you could set up your AI Feed to monitor all relevant “Privacy” updates related to “Marketing”. Feedly will use AI to curate all relevant content and display it to you in a form of a well-cited article.
This saves lots of time helping you stay updated on the relevant updates in your niche. It can also be used to create newsletters to keep your subscribers informed on everything going on your industry.
Linkedin has become a much more active social media network. I find inspiration there by scrolling through my feeds.
LinkedIn highlights popular content on your network. You can save any of the updates and then check your saved collection when looking for inspiration.
You can use Instagram and TikTok (no, don’t use TikTok!) in a similar way especially if you are into food, travel, or beauty niches. If you are using multiple social media channels (which you probably should), make sure to use a link-in-bio tool to gradually build followship everywhere and create cross-channel brand recognizability.
Reddit is one of the most powerful sources of content ideas in many niches. Find relevant subreddits, join them, and your personal feed will be customized to your preferred topics.
You can also sort any individual subreddit to see “Hot” discussions to see which topics triggered the most interest.
Make sure to scroll through discussions to see what people are saying. In most cases, comments are even more inspiring than the initial post.
GigaBrain is an online tool that searches Reddit for your keyword and summarizes what it finds using generative AI. You can see the subreddits the summary is based on and filter your summary by any of them:
If you scroll down, you will find the list of threads the tool found on Reddit based on your query. You can summarize any of these threads and its comments.
Giga search is a good way to better understand how Reddit users are discussing your brand or your competitors. It is also a good idea to use the tool as an additional keyword research tool to better understand the user-generated context behind any keyword and include these findings in your content creation strategy.
Reddit marketing is not easy but it works great for creating linkable content (or link magnets) that attracts a lot of important signals.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo offers a “Trending feeds” feature that tracks popular articles on any keyword or topic over the past six, 12, or 24 hours. You can filter results by language, and block any specific domains you choose to get better results going forward.
You can also create alerts based on your feed settings for Buzzsumo to send you email digests with recent articles on your topic.
Key Takeaways on Finding Popular Topics for Your Blog
Finding popular blog topics can be a challenge. Remember to stay connected with your blogging community, keep an eye on industry trends, and be part of social media and niche forums to discover what’s hot and what’s likely to attract attention to your writing.
Most importantly, always add your unique perspective and voice to every topic you choose.
- Collaboration is key: Connect with other bloggers in your niche or industry, share ideas, and support each other’s work.
- Use a variety of tools: Buzzsumo, VidIQ, Answer The Public, and Feedly can help you research trending keywords and topics.
- Stay informed: Subscribe to industry blogs and follow relevant social media accounts.
- Embrace social listening: Pay attention to what people are discussing on platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.
- Don’t duplicate, innovate: Use popular topics as inspiration, but always add your unique perspective and insights.
Ann Smarty is the founder of Smarty Marketing, a boutique SEO agency based in New York, and Viral Content Bee, a social media promotion tool. Ann’s search engine optimization career began in 2010. She is the former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs, including Small Business Trends and Mashable.
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