What is Blog Post Ideation? Definition, Strategies, and More

One of the most important terms thrown around in content marketing is “topic ideation.” Broadly, ideation is simply the process of coming up with ideas for blog posts and other forms of content. But, as with everything in marketing, there’s more to it than that.

Blog post ideation is a deeply involved process, and it’s absolutely critical to get it right. Poor ideation leaves you with a struggling blog that never generates interest, traffic, or engagement. Good ideation can catapult you into viral success and position you at the top of your industry.

How do you do it? How do you know if you’re doing it right? How do you improve your process? Let’s talk about everything involved in blog post ideation.

What is Ideation?

The dictionary definition of ideation is:

“The capacity for, or the act of, forming or entertaining ideas.”

Blog post ideation (or topic ideation) is the process of forming ideas for blog content. I’ll use terms like blog ideation, blog post ideation, and topic ideation interchangeably throughout this post because they all refer to the same thing.

Ideation is an ongoing process. You should always have your ideation engine revving in the background; when you’re reading other blogs, when you’re talking to employees, when you’re entertaining sales calls, when you’re developing new products.

Ideation is the first step in good blogging. A blog cannot succeed without good content, and good content requires a good idea as a starting point. Everything, from your content writing to your image creation to your technical SEO to your social media marketing, relies on good topic ideation.

Ideation is also about more than just your blog. While the focus of this post is on blog post ideation, blogs are part of your overall marketing, and your ideation can expand into other marketing campaigns. You can write a bunch of foundational content on a given topic and then spin those into the subject of speeches you give at trade shows, into subjects you talk about on podcasts, and into the core premise of your paid advertising.

Why Blog Post Ideation Matters

It’s not really a stretch to say that good blog post ideation is foundational to the success of your business. Without a strong idea – or, more realistically, hundreds of related strong ideas – you’re going to flounder.

On a more specific level, topic ideation has a lot of tangible benefits.

• It helps you keep your ideas, themes, and content organized.
• It helps you stay on brand and define the boundaries of your brand.
• It helps you improve the overall quality of your content.
• It helps you put intention and focus behind your content marketing.
• It helps you keep everything organized and avoid repetition and duplication.
• It helps you stand out from your competitors and avoid just copying their homework.

Good ideation helps you stand on your own as a unique, creative, and expert resource in your industry.

What Are the Top Ideation Strategies?

With all the conceptual stuff out of the way, let’s get into the tangible and useful strategies for topic and blog ideation you can use. This is the bulk of today’s post, so buckle up; there’s a lot of ground to cover.

Before we dig deep, I need to say one thing: don’t be too selective with ideation methods. Your goal at this stage is not to come up with good ideas; it’s to come up with ideas in bulk. When you free yourself to come up with bad ideas, good ideas follow. You can filter, qualify, and refine them later, and I’ll go into that process too.

Audience Research

What better source of topics could you have than your audience? These are the people you’ve already attracted to your site, who are already interested in your products, in your topics, and in your overall presence.

There are a lot of ways you can leverage your audience for topic ideas.

On the conceptual level, start by thinking about what your audience goes through in their daily life and how they would engage with your product or industry. What kinds of pain points do they have, and how can you turn that into content? Whether it’s DIY problem-solving steps, a tutorial for using your product, or just a deeper discussion and analysis of a problem, a single pain point can be a valuable mine for topics.

There’s also a pretty good chance that people in your audience are going to reach out and ask you questions. They might be through a contact form, email, social media posts, or even blog comments. Sometimes, they can even be Q&A segments in speeches you give or even in casual conversations you have.

These questions will likely follow common themes, depending on the audience asking them. Some will be baseline information from uninformed people. Some will be more tangible questions from people who know the basics and want details. Some will be expert-level questions. All of these can be valuable topic ideas.

You can also just reach out to your audience and ask if they have questions or topics they wish you would cover. A post on social media, an AMA on Reddit, a poll or survey on your website; these can all be great options to get a direct line to people in your audience, and the results can give you hundreds (or thousands) of topic ideas.

Keyword vs Topic

Most people go directly to keyword research when the subject of topic ideation comes up.

It’s not a bad idea. Keywords are the seeds of the ideas people use to search for content, so they can give you a good starting point.

The problem is that a keyword and a topic idea, while similar, are not the same. Keywords encompass a whole range of topic ideas. One keyword, when viewed through different perspectives and with different goals, can be the seed of a variety of topics.

As long as you recognize that a keyword and a topic are different, keyword research can be a gold mine. Make use of a variety of methods to perform keyword research, such as:

• Google’s Keyword Research tools, like the Keyword Planner and their autocomplete.
• Competitor keyword research tools like Topicfinder.
• Google Trends and enhanced trend software like Glimpse Trends or Exploding Topics
• Keyword extraction tools like Keywords Everywhere.

There are a million different guides written about how to perform keyword research, so I’m not going to dedicate a ton of space to the actual process here today. That’s another topic (eh?) I can cover another time.

The important part is that a keyword can be misleading in both directions. You might write off a topic as “too low traffic”, but the collective sum of all of keywords that your post would have ranked for would have had immense traffic. Or you might see a keyword as “too competitive”, but hundreds of the keywords that it could have ranked for are not competitive at all.

A keyword is not the same as a blog post topic. 

Social Media Research

Social media can also be a powerful topic ideation tool. There are a couple of caveats to using it, though.

First, social media is, by necessity, going to be an echo of what people are already talking about and the topics they’re already covering. If all you do is watch social media and parrot the topics you see, you’re going to be late to the party every time.

This isn’t a bad thing; you can leverage it as you responding to those topics or otherwise take advantage of being late by accumulating different perspectives and writing “bottom line” posts. But you need to bring that intentionality to it. You can’t just see a topic written by a competitor and go write the same thing.

Second, social media requires you to spend time on those social media platforms. If you’re not careful, this can very easily waste a ton of time and energy, especially since social media algorithms are precision-engineered to get you to waste time on them. You have to have a lot of discipline to use them effectively.

Third, social media only works when the people (your competitors, your audience, industry influencers) are actually using it. If you spend time on the wrong social networks, you aren’t going to be effectively using your time.

Start by figuring out which social networks are commonly used by the audiences you want to watch. Register business-specific accounts you use only to follow the people whose content and topics you want to monitor, and keep those accounts as isolated as possible for the most focused results.

From there, develop a process for examining the posts you see and figuring out the topics and what you can do with them. Can you cover the same topic? Can you take their seed and expand on it? Do you disagree and want to refute it? All of these can be valid topics, and sometimes you can do more than one, so it’s a well of good ideas when handled right.

I also recommend using either an incognito window or disabling ad blockers for at least some of your research. The paid ads your competitors are running can also be a good source of information. Just be very careful with ads, as they can also be a vector for malware. Watch, don’t engage.

Employee Research

Another good source of potential topic ideas is your staff.

Different businesses will have different resources here, but consider:

• Talk to your sales reps and see what questions your leads typically ask.
• Talk to sales managers and see what techniques and information are most effective.
• Ask for recordings of sales calls to listen through for potential ideas.
• Talk to members of your customer retention teams about why people refund/return/cancel subscriptions.

Of course, some of your employees won’t have a perspective on the issues. Plenty of people work for companies that make products they wouldn’t use in daily life. It never hurts to ask, though.

Perform a Content Gap Analysis

Another great source of potential topic ideas is the results of a content gap analysis.

A content gap analysis is a review of what content exists already for a keyword or topic, and the gaps between the current state of that content, and what you could produce.

Common content gaps include:

• All the extant content is good but outdated; you could produce more refreshed content.
• All the extant content covers the topic across different pages, but you could aggregate it into a more thorough guide.
• All the content out there is dense and harder to read; you could translate it into easier-to-parse formats.

This can be an analysis of content across the first page of Google for a keyword, or it can be an analysis of the content between you and a competitor. Both are valid perspectives and can give you great ideas.

Look for Opportunities to Respond to Existing Content

Another great option is to look for recently published and trending topics that have an opinionated slant to them. Your goal is to take the content that another brand has published and respond to it.

There are generally three ways to respond to content.

• Agreement. “This person is right and here’s why I think their argument is good and needs more attention.” This can be effective and can even get your content shared and linked by the original, but it does tend to draw attention away from you.
• Yes, But. “This person is half-right, but I want to add qualification or talk about edge cases.” This can play as an add-on to the original content and can go very well as a second step in the discussion.
• Disagreement. “This person is entirely off-base and here’s why.” A deep, data-driven analysis of why a person’s gut feelings are wrong can be very powerful and can even trend more over the original if done right.

The tricky part here is that disagreement is commonly used, and Google has started to promote consensus in search, so they tend to prefer agreement. Agreement is difficult to rank for, though, since, by definition, it’s something already being covered. You just have to do it better, do it faster, or add a twist.

Build a Pillar Model and Expand Topics

As you go through this process, you’ll find that one idea often cascades into other ideas. There are a ton of different ways you can structure this – the spiderweb method, the snowflake method, the spoke-and-wheel method – but they all come back to the same general concept.

One core idea is almost always made up of smaller component ideas.

Sometimes, that’s how you outline a single piece of content. Those component ideas aren’t big enough to support an entire blog post and can be explained in 300-500 words, so they become components of a blog post.

Other times, those component ideas can be whole blog posts themselves. Those can feed back into summarized versions that make up a larger core pillar post.

You can also retrofit older content into these frameworks using tools for keyword clustering and grouping. This, too, adds intentionality to your blogging.

Accumulate Small Ideas for Larger Posts

Throughout this process, you’ll also find additional ideas that are too small to support whole posts and don’t fit nicely into any other larger topics. These are great fodder for filler and linking posts.

Basically, I’m including this entry on the list to remind you that all ideas can be good ideas in the right context. Even if it doesn’t seem to fit, write it down in your ideation document and save it for later. It might find a home in the most surprising ways.

Revisit Older Ideas and Repurpose Content

Content marketing isn’t one-and-done or fire-and-forget. Old content can be refurbished, updated, expanded, merged, and repurposed.

Ideas you’ve already used can be used again, with different focuses, different contexts, or just the information that has changed since the last time you covered it. Your old published posts, especially the ones that performed well but dropped off over time, are an excellent resource.

What About AI Tools?

The elephant in the room here is AI topic ideation tools. Can you use them?

I say yes, with several major qualifications.

The first is the ethical concerns surrounding AI. There are a million different discussions of this online, so I’m not going to get into it in detail here, but if you (or, more importantly, your audience) take a principled stance on AI for reasons like climate impact, copyright theft, or social value, then don’t use it on the back end, because it undermines your credibility.

The second is how AI works. LLMs, in particular, are awful to use because the topics they generate can be nonsensical or just a scrape of the top few posts for “topic ideas in X keyword” or other ultra-generic results. In fact, LLMs are designed to produce the most statistically likely output for a given input. By definition, they aren’t going to give you something uniquely valuable. It’s almost the opposite.

That said, sometimes AI hallucinations can inspire other ideas. Sometimes, a tool that spits out the obvious will give you something you hadn’t thought of. And of course, some “AI” is more like older machine learning and is more limited and more analytic, and can be better. As long as you know what you’re doing, these tools can be great.

How to Qualify and Filter Ideas

The entire post above has been all about coming up with ideas. I recommend just slapping them into a spreadsheet in a column so you can build out an ideation document and track what you’re doing.

Once you have this massive pile of ideas, what do you do with it? How do you figure out which ideas are the good ones and which ones are oversaturated, undervalued, or going to fall flat?

One thing I like to start with is organization and grouping. Build out each idea into its overarching keyword or topic, possibly up two or three layers, and see what kinds of structures emerge. Keyword clustering tools can help with this.

This can give you an idea of the overall subjects and trends you’ve developed and can help you put together a content plan.

When evaluating a specific idea, I also like to think about things like what kind of content it falls into.

• How long will the content end up being?
• How unique is the topic and your perspective on it?
• Is there any element of timing or seasonality to consider for the topic?
• Does the topic fit with a specific kind of marketing goal?
• Is the topic evergreen, controversial, or meant to be link bait?

Answering these questions can help you figure out what kind of content a topic can produce. Remember, too, that one keyword can spring off many topics, and one topic can be covered in multiple posts across different perspectives and purposes.

The most important piece of information to think about here is how the topic fits into your audience. Is the topic meant to broaden your existing audience by attracting new people? Is it meant to address a common pain point? Is it meant to provide added value or information to existing users or win new users?

Further, think about audience segmentation. Which portions of your audience are you reaching, and which ones do you tend to leave out?

After all of this, you can qualify your ideas based on competition and demand. This is where you do more technical, data-focused research. What is the search volume for the main keywords your topic would cover? What is the existing competition, and how hard will it be to supplant them? Are there other topics, sub-topics, or related posts you can work into your marketing?

Naturally, some topics will end up being put on the back burner because they represent a lot of work to put together and comparatively little value or chance of success. Others need to be produced or prioritized for the value they represent. Some fall into both categories, as something valuable that you need to release with the right timing to get the most out of. And some just won’t seem like good ideas at all and will need to be filed away in the refuse pile for later reevaluation.

Keep it Going

Everything above sounds like a ton of work because it is. Pretty much my full-time job is doing this for my clients, even with excellent tools like Topicfinder in my corner to help. That’s on top of my other full-time jobs running my businesses.

The trick is to recognize that this isn’t a task you complete. This is an ongoing process you have on the back burner and work on a little every day for as long as you’re running your business and handling your marketing. Of course, you can always hire someone like me to do it for you.

Ideation isn’t easy, but eventually, it will be second nature to you, and brainstorming will become easier. But if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

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