How to Find Content for Your Blog if You Run Out of Ideas

One of the biggest challenges we face as content marketers is coming up with fuel for the endlessly burning fire that is a blog.

You need to be continually publishing content. A consistent schedule of new content is pretty much a requirement to be able to grow in today’s environment. If you let that fire go out, it’s pretty difficult to get it burning again.

There’s just one problem: where the heck do you come up with all those ideas? You can’t just write the same thing over and over, but by the time you’re a year or two in, it feels like every idea you have is something you already wrote.

Fortunately, once you know what you’re doing and establish a process, coming up with ideas is the easy part. Here’s a bunch of options you can work into your daily life, and you’ll never run out of ideas again.

Keep Track of Your Ideas

The first and most important thing is to have some way to record your ideas at the drop of a hat. Whether you’re settling in for a few hours of dedicated topic research or you’re on your commute and you have a flash of inspiration, you need a way to write it down.

I recommend a two or three-tiered system. You want a master document with all of your ideas, tracking whether you’ve written them, what the published URLs are, and other useful information. You also want some kind of scratch pad where you can just jot down notes or even voice recordings to inspire you. You may also want a middle layer of filters where you turn sporadic ideas into something more tangible, but not yet refined.

I used to recommend something like Evernote for this, but they’ve gone downhill a lot recently. Fortunately, there are a bunch of other apps you can try, like ClickUp, OneNote, Notion, Obsidian, or even Google Keep.

Look for Common Topics and Make a New Pillar

This is one I’ve been focusing on a lot recently.

After you’ve been blogging for a year or two (or longer, in my case), you end up with a lot of sporadic content that can be related but isn’t interconnected. You keep coming back to similar topics, after all, since that’s how operating inside a niche works.

Start making a relational map between your different pieces of content, and look for places where you have clusters that have no centralization. That’s an opportunity to create a pillar post, a long, detailed post with links to and from all of those resources.

You can even use tools to help you find these relational maps.

Various Google Recommendations

I hesitated to put this entry on the list. Not because they are bad recommendations but because they are common recommendations.

You can get good topic ideas from these resources, but since they’re some of the first places everyone looks, you might struggle to stand out from the pack. Still, it’s worth mentioning, so I added them.

Search autocomplete options

When you start to type something into Google search, they pop up a box trying to predict what you’re searching for. These are generally ideas pulled from actual queries and content in the index, so it’s usually a set of pretty good recommendations.

You can do this manually, but there are tools like this one from Pemavor that can pull the data automatically for you.

The “people also ask” box

One of Google’s search enhancements is that just about every query has a box near the top with questions people have, ostensibly, asked about your keyword. You can harvest these for ideas.

Keep in mind that some of these aren’t really relevant. You have to evaluate for yourself if the questions are legit or if they’re just kind of weird templated spins on a general FAQ. Also, keep in mind that when you click to expand a question, Google populates the list with several more questions, so you can easily harvest dozens of questions about every keyword you search.

The “people also search for” suggestions

At the bottom of the first page of Google’s search results is a box with “people also search for” recommendations.

These tend to be competitive keywords rather than related keywords, so they can give you a whole new set of ideas to spin off.

Image search related keywords

If you search your keyword and click over to the image search results right across the top, you’ll find a list of related image suggestions.

This is probably the least used set of suggestions, but it can be pretty solid and can give you recommendations you might not have thought of. They do tend to be more generic, short-tail versions of keywords, though, so keep that in mind.

Search Console recommendations

A relatively recent experimental feature in Google’s Search Console is a recommendations box. This box has all sorts of recommendations, and they can range from “most of your pages don’t have Schema” to “one of your keywords is on the rise.”

They don’t necessarily tell you what to do with the information (other than fixing technical issues), but you can use it to come up with content ideas when it’s relevant.

Questions from Comments on Top Posts

Sometimes, your own site is the best source of topic ideas you could ask for.

If you have an active community, try looking into the blog comments in your top posts. A lot of them are just going to be generic “thanks for the post!” or “Wow, I never thought of it like that” kinds of semi-spam, but sometimes people will have compelling questions.

Sometimes, you have already answered those questions because people online have a hard time reading, but other times, it’s a legitimate question. I always recommend answering them briefly in the comments, but it’s also a good opportunity to spin it out into a whole blog post. You can even go back and link the post as a reply to the comment!

Ask Your Audience for Their Burning Questions

Another option is to just ask your audience what they want to know. It sounds simple, but it really works… if you have a good direct line to them.

The best is, of course, your newsletter. If you have an email newsletter, and you should, you can send out a question in your regular digest and ask for questions. Depending on what you get back, you can either make a FAQ-style round-up post, or you can use it to fuel a series of larger posts. Or both!

If you don’t have a newsletter, first off, make one. Then, consider other ways to ask a question, like a slide-in pop-up box, a top-of-window bar, or posts on social media.

Trending Topics and Presumptive Future Trends

Another option you can use is trending topic data sources. Google Trends is the big one, but I like to add on an enhancement that can help predict future trends. Exploding Topics and Glimpse Trends are both options you can explore.

The trick with these topic sources is that you want to be as quick on the draw as you can, so you need a relatively fast and reactive content production pipeline to make the best use of them. The later you are to a trend, the less value you can pull from it before it tapers off.

Browse Requests on Connectively-Like Sites

Connectively is dead, but there are a ton of alternatives out there. You can search for my guide on Content Powered for a thorough review of a ton of them.

A lot of them are free to register, and you can see what kinds of requests journalists and publishers are making for sources. That can give you an idea of their upcoming content, and you can use that for ideas.

Browse Recent Topics in Your Most Relevant Subreddits

Another good source of topic ideas is Reddit. Pretty much every possible topic you can think of will have a subreddit somewhere, and you can browse those subreddits to find what people are talking about, what questions they’re asking, and what kinds of responses and information people have to provide.

You can also consider posting on Reddit to ask for ideas or ask what questions people have, but be cautious. Some subreddits are very aggressive at downvoting people trying to mine them as a resource, and others just won’t like you for one reason or another. Spend some time lurking and evaluating the community first.

Scope Out Your Competition’s Recent Content

Your competitors are in the same boat you are, and they have their own ways of finding content ideas. Which means you can use them as a source of ideas.

The easiest option is to just see what they’ve been publishing recently and do the same thing. It’s simple, it’s effective, it helps you take advantage of Google’s recent push to promote consensus.

A more interesting option is to take where they leave off, and go a level or two deeper. Take their premise and tie it into another industry, take their logic another step further, or respond to their ideas and explain why you think they’re on the right track – or the wrong one.

You can also look for gaps in what they cover and try to do your own coverage in the empty space. It’s the same as looking for content gaps in your own site, just with another site, and with more flexibility because you can step on their toes all you like.

Check Alternative Media Channels (Video, Podcast, Infographic, and More)

Plenty of content creators produce content for other channels but never actually blog about it. If you’ve ever been searching for information only to find the only resources are “watch this YouTube video” or “check our discord,” well, there’s a huge opportunity for you.

You’ve already demonstrated interest, but the format doesn’t exist, and that’s a gap you can fill.

• Check YouTube videos for interesting topics you can cover in a text-based format.
• Check podcasts, especially podcasts that don’t have transcriptions, that you can mimic.
• Check infographics for information and studies you can expand upon as a blog post.
• Check questions people ask that lead to closed-off, non-indexed locations like Discord servers and Telegram channels, and bring the information to light.

As an added bonus, people like me who really would prefer to skim a blog post and not have to page through a YouTube video will thank you.

Check on Industry Show and Conference Talk Topics

Most industries have some kind of conference circuit around the world every year. Even if it’s not the kind of thing you’d ever attend, you can still draw inspiration from it. These conferences tend to publish their schedules ahead of time, so attendees can pick and choose what speeches and presentations to attend.

You won’t get a full rundown of what is said in those presentations, but you do usually get a subject and blurb, as well as the speaker’s name, which you can use to look up their information and positions. Then, just take that idea and give it your own twist.

Update Old Posts Losing Steam

Sometimes, the best source of ideas is just yourself, from months or years ago. You likely have a lot of content on your blog already, and some of that content used to be more active and better ranked than it is now.

Maybe the topic has gone out of favor, or maybe a competitor outdid you and dropped you down the ranks. Whatever the case, you can update and improve old posts, bringing them to the fore again, and that can work just as well as a new post.

Try Giving Topicfinder a Spin

Obviously, I can’t write a blog post about finding topics without promoting Topicfinder, right? After all, I literally made Topicfinder specifically as a tool to help me come up with topic ideas for myself and my clients in a way that was innovative, useful, and effective.

It’s only even a commercial product because I know first-hand that it works. So, why not give it a try? It has a free trial and everything.

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