Let’s get back to blogging for a bit. The hardest part of the process – for me, at least – is coming up with a good topic.
Here’s how to come up with a boat-load of new topics you can use. The key is to reuse old ideas as well as come up with new ones. After all, many of your readers will be new, so what’s old to you will be unfamiliar to them.
Remember to write down your ideas so you can use them on your blogging calendar!
- Who are your followers? Think about what questions they may have, and what answers they’d like to see in your blog. What topics would interest them? Try to come up with one good topic to begin with.
- Change the scope of your topic. Here’s where you start brainstorming. Let’s say your topic idea was “Blogging.” Changing the scope means shifting from broad to narrow (or vice versa). Additional topic ideas, then, would include “How to Create a Blog,” “How to Write a Blog Post,” “5 Types of Blog Post,” and “How to Brainstorm a Blog Topic.”
- Change the timeframe. Try narrowing the time, or broadening it, to come up with new topics. “The Best Websites of 2019” or “This Month’s Best Writing Blogs.”
- Flip from positive to negative – or vice versa. Instead of writing about “10 Ways to Write a Query Letter,” try writing “10 Things NOT to Include in Your Query Letter.”
- Introduce a new format. Instead of always posting an article, try changing it up with infographics, videos, and checklists. A title like “The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing” could easily become “The Ultimate Email Marketing Checklist” or “The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing [Infographic]”.
- Try a topic generator. Hubspot has a great one here.
- Don’t forget to weed out the non-starters. Go through your (now long) list and weed out topics that wouldn’t interest your followers. By this time, you should have much more than a year’s worth of blog topics.
How do you come up with blog topic ideas?