How to Come up with Killer Blog Post Ideas

Here’s a little secret: every blogger struggles to come up with ideas for content from time to time. Whether you’re blogging daily or twice weekly, you’re pretty much bound to hit a major creative block at some point. As Peter Shallard of CopyBlogger points out, “generating consistent (and usefully great) ideas for your audience is a murky science.” Besides, it can be challenging to continually put a creative spin on content for “boring” industries. To help you create an editorial calendar that your readers will love, we’ve compiled a list of ideas to help you develop topics that will boost your metrics:

Use Your Blogging Metrics

The most reliable guide for determining topics your readers go crazy over is your own historical blogging metrics. Which articles gained the most page views, social shares, and inbound links in the past? Whether your readers go crazy over social media topics or long lists posts, use your metrics as inspiration for creating similar content that’s proven to work.

Leverage Affinity Data

Google provides content marketers with a little-known tool for developing blog post ideas. Affinity data, more commonly known as Google auto-suggest, is the content which populates when you’re typing in the beginnings of a search query:

Use the automatically-populated concepts to help develop content marketing themes. By taking the world’s biggest search engine’s advice on concepts that people care about, you can get content marketing ideas that are both creative and likely to help you drive more traffic from Google.

Listen to Your Audience

Great bloggers take the time to transform their readers into a community. Listen closely to the questions your audience asks in your comments or on social media networks. What topics are they interested in learning more about? Apply the ideas your readers ask about to blog posts ideas that will provide value to your audience and help you build a better community.

Interested in learning more about how to develop creative and effective ideas for content? Check out our article 35 Killer Blog Post Ideas for an Awesome Business Blog.