5 Tips for Generating Blog Post Ideas

All bloggers know the importance of keeping their blog fresh with new posts. While quality will always win out over quantity, a blog that's rarely updated will lose readers over time and struggle to gain any real traction. However, no matter how passionate you are about your subject or how skilled a writer you are, there are times the creative well runs dry. When you're short of ideas, these simple tips can help to spark your inspiration.

Quora is a popular question-and-answer site which covers a huge array of topics. While the quality of writing and information presented can be hit and miss, if you subscribe to the sections which relate to your blog, you'll be provided with a steady stream of new topic ideas that you can pick up and run with. One of the great benefits of using Quora for inspiration is that the questions are written by real people with real interests, and both questions and their answers can be voted on by the community, giving a quick and easy indication of a topic's popularity.

Following other bloggers is of course a vital way of keeping up with the conversation in your niche, but it also pays to scour the comments sections. On popular posts which generate large amounts of interaction, it's likely that there will be questions and comments from readers which go unanswered by the writer. These lonely and unacknowledged contributions can often be the catalyst for a blog post idea, and the fact that someone has taken the trouble to post their comment means it's a subject that interests at least some people, and so should be worth exploring in your own writing.

Whether you use social media or not, there's no denying the importance it has assumed in modern culture. The trending section of Twitter gives an instant overview of what people are talking about right now, while the search function allows you to get more closely relevant results. Social media may be full of noise, but if you take the time to sift through it all, you can find plenty of gems worth writing about.

As an avid blog fan, you're probably familiar with the concept of RSS feeds. However, there's one feed you may not have paid much attention to, but which can be a great source of post ideas. Each of the sub-category pages on Amazon features a feed of the best-selling products in that category; subscribe to a selection of these feeds and you'll have a constant handle on what people are buying in that sector. Of course, this will have direct relevance for blogs with postings about products, but it's also a valuable insight into overall activity in an area, and can be a great source of topics for informational posts.

If you need an idea for your next killer blog post, and you need it right now, this last piece of advice isn't going to be of immediate help. However, if you start following it from now on, you'll rarely find yourself completely out of ideas in the future. Get into the habit of taking brief notes as you go about your daily life, wherever and whenever inspiration strikes. You can use an old-fashioned notebook if you wish, but the ubiquity of smartphones means that a note-taking app is perhaps more convenient.

Ideas can pop up, seemingly at random, and often disappear just as quickly; make sure you have a quick and easy way of jotting down a phrase or word that captures that fleeting thought. After a few days or weeks, you'll have built up a large store of possible posting topics to draw on. Some or even most of them will come to nothing, but simply reading through your list is often enough to get your creative juices flowing.

For many bloggers, the actual writing of a post is the easiest and most enjoyable part, while a stubbornly blank page can make you wonder what possessed you to get involved in blogging in the first place. These five tips will hopefully ensure you're never again lost for a new and compelling post.

/Lukasz Zelezny
lukasz@zelezny.co.uk