How to generate content ideas for your blog

Creating content for a blog for the same niche day after day and year after year can seem impossible. But, the truth is, it’s really not that hard if you plan ahead.

You need to focus on your niche and your audience with each piece of content, as well as understand the purpose of the blog content.

Read about your industry

Staying up to date on your industry will go a long way in giving you ideas of what to write about. Information that experts talk about in magazines and in the news is wonderful fodder for future blog posts.

Read competitors’ blog posts

Pick a few high-end competitors in your niche to read what they have to say. Sign up for their newsletters and regularly read what they have to say about your niche. Ideas will come to you from reading.

Brainstorm every day

Take a few minutes each day to put pen to paper (or keyboard to document) to write down any ideas that come to mind. Just make a list as fast as you can about different topics to write about on your blog.

Request guest bloggers

Keep your blog open for guest blog posts. If you bring in other experts, people will actually see you as an expert even more. Set rules of originality and uniqueness for guest bloggers.

Create a new view

As you read what others are saying, or even what you have said in the past, try to approach the subject from a new angle. Maybe if you wrote “10 reasons to blog daily”, you could choose just one of the reasons to expand.

Reuse old content

The old content probably needs to be updated, but instead of updating it where it is, why not write a new post about it, link the old post from the new post, and vice versa? Explain how the publications differ today and why.

Ask readers questions

Readers and your audience are the perfect people to get content ideas from. Blog posts are the perfect place to highlight a reader’s question and answer it. Then you can also add them to your FAQs.

change formats

If something is a textual piece, you can change it to a podcast or video. If it’s a “how to” piece, you can change it to a more informative piece instead of a how to piece. Changing the format of a previous blog post can help you create a new way to tell your audience about something important.

Curate other people’s content

It’s about extracting content that your audience would enjoy and that is relevant to your niche, and then sharing it with your audience via a link on your blog. But, there is a little more to it than that. Be sure to add your own thoughts in your introduction to the information you’re sharing.