Céillie Clark-Keane May 9, 2021 We’ve all been there. You have slots on your blog calendar to fill, but all your keyword research feels meh and all the titles on your to-do list feel uninspired. And if it’s boring you, it’ll bore your readers. You need some inspiration, sure, but more importantly, you need some unique blog ideas—fast.
In this post, we’re sharing how to stop waiting around for inspiration and start figuring out which post you’re going to write next. Here are eight ways to come up with unique blog ideas:
- Hold a brainstorm
- Check in on social
- Read your comments
- Start with your personas
- Talk with other teams
- Jump on new keywords
- Focus on your competitors
- Use an idea generator
Let’s get started.
8 tips and tools to generate unique blog ideas
Sometimes, keyword research doesn’t quite cut it. Maybe you want to talk about something that your readers wouldn’t know to search for. Maybe you want to target a small segment of your audience. Or perhaps you want to find another angle for a more traditional topic. Here are some methods you can use for more authentic content.
1. Hold a brainstorm
I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of my workday sitting at my computer. When I’m not in a meeting or working on a blog post, I’m responding quickly to Slack, checking Google Analytics, sending emails, or digging into keyword research.
There’s not a lot of time for creative thinking. That’s why holding a brainstorm can be a great first step for coming up with unique blog ideas. The best brainstorming happens during generative, collaborative sessions where any ideas are on the table. That means unique topics and unexpected angles are bound to come up.
So whether you can set aside time with your team to focus on blog ideas or add some time to your next regular marketing meetings, be sure to brainstorm for ideas.
2. Check in on social
You can find out what your audience is talking about lately by checking out what they’re posting on social. This includes the big platforms, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, as well as other social media networks, like Pinterest, Quora, or TikTok. You can check your tags and mentions to see what your following is saying about your business, and you can spend some time on your homepage. But to get even better, even more unique blog ideas, go a step further.
Look at posts from industry leaders and check any industry hashtags. Either way, be sure to spend some time scrolling through the comments, posts, and replise.
Digital advertising, for example, has #ppcchat. This hashtag thread has so many strategies, questions, and hot takes.
Finding a take like this is a good jumping point for a blog post. Why do you agree or disagree? What are other expert opinions? And, of course, why does this matter to PPC marketers in the first place?
3. Read your comments
Finding out what your audience is talking about on social is good, but finding out exactly how they’re responding to the blog posts you’ve already published is even better.
That’s why it’s a good idea to check your comment sections when you’re looking for ideas. You can see what they’re getting stuck on in your posts, what information they’re volunteering about their strategies, and so much more. In fact, sometimes you can even get requests for more information that can turn into a new blog post.
Take a look at this comment on Gordon’s post about Instagram captions:
Gordon’s right—this post has some awesome captions that are ideal to copy or get inspired by regardless of their celebrity status. But Shawn has an interesting idea for a new angle that might be more actionable for small businesses and could make for a great blog post.
So next time you’re looking for unexpected blog post ideas, head to the comments of your posts. Better yet, check these regularly and record any suggestions that come up so you have a list of ideas whenever you need them.
4. Start with your personas
Another way to figure out unique blog ideas is to stop focusing on keywords and topics and to start instead with your buyer personas. Personas are a marketing tool that helps you keep your ideal audience in mind while you’re working on marketing campaigns and materials. That includes your content.
In fact, content that you create based on your personas can even perform better for your brand.
58% of B2B marketers see “audience relevance” as one of the deciding factors in the success of content marketing.
The best way to use your personas to generate content ideas is to start with some questions. Here are a few examples:
- What’s stressing out your persona? What’s the solution?
- What’s something your persona could be spending less time on? How?
- How does your persona need to prep for upcoming holidays?
Remember, these are just a starting point, and you can get even more specific about your product and offering, too. So pull out your personas and start thinking about what blog post they want to read.
5. Talk to other teams
This tip is simple: Your most interesting blog post ideas aren’t going to come from your marketing team. Instead, the ideas for those posts—the ones that speak directly to common frustrations, the ones that tap into trends in your industry—are going to come from people who are working directly with your audience. That’s why you need to talk to your sales and CS teams.
Your sales team knows your prospects. They spend all day learning about new leads, figuring out which content your best prospects are engaging with on your site, and talking to your prospects over calls and demos.
Your support or success team, on the other hand, talks to your customers a lot. Even better, they hear what excites your customers and what worries them—plus, they hear this over and over again from tons of customers, so they know what patterns are there.
These patterns are gold for unique blog ideas. So set up some meetings, put some questions together, and get ready to write some awesome posts.
6. Jump on new keywords
I know this post focuses on how to come up with blog post ideas that don’t start with the same keyword research all content marketers are focusing on. But jumping on new keywords before they gain traction, or worse, peak and plummet, is a great way to find new ideas that still offer some organic traffic.
Keyword tools like Semrush and Ahrefs both have views that feature newly discovered keywords related to your search query. Most of the time, these suggestions won’t have a ton of organic searches, but this can represent the beginnings of a trend.
See “Newly discovered” in the left nav.
If you want to focus on some new, trending keywords that have some traffic, you can take a look at Exploding Topics, run by SEO expert Brian Dean.
Whether you subscribe to the tool or sign up for the newsletter, Exploding Topics will help you find newly trending keywords while they’re still exploding, so there’s plenty of time for you to run with the blog post idea.
7. Focus on your competitors
Innovation doesn’t always require a blank slate—sometimes you can find unique ideas by looking into what’s already been done successfully. That’s why focusing on your competitor’s posts can be perfect for sourcing new ideas for your own content.
You can use Ahref’s Content Gap tool to identify your competitor’s top-ranking keywords, which will lead you to their top-ranking blog posts. Even more, the tool will tell you what keywords one or more of your competitors are ranking for that you’re not. That means you’ll be focusing on content you don’t also have.
No keyword research tool? No problem. You can do this manually, too, just with less precision. Take a look at your competitor’s blog and see what they’re posting about—then think about how you can build on that and create content that’s even better.
8. Use a blog post ideas generator
Sometimes, you’re in a rut and you can’t do any more digging into comments and social threads or thinking out loud. This doesn’t mean you’re at a loss. You just need to use a tool to give you some ideas.
That’s exactly why blog topic generators exist.
HubSpot’s Blog Idea Generator is a great place to start. The tool lets you input up to five nouns, and then it gives you five blog post ideas (or more, if you enter your email address). Here’s an example topic below.
My nouns for this search: Marketing, content, and, of course, laundromats.
The structures are mostly the same, so this isn’t a foolproof topic generator. But even if you don’t end up using the exact ideas, the structure of these topics can help you switch things up. For instance, I almost never think to use “The Next Big Thing for X” structure for blog post titles, but this is a good way to present thought leadership.
Plus, there’s another reason I included this one last. You can use these generators to find angles or approaches to bigger topics—like Instagram SEO or LinkedIn networking—that come up in any of the steps above.
Time to get started with your unique blog ideas
There you have it: eight ways you can come with unique blog ideas. Whether you’re struggling trying to fill your calendar or simply looking to shake things up and write some fun content, use these strategies to brainstorm new, out-of-the-box topics.
Digital & Social Articles on Business 2 Community
(385)
