When next you experience writer’s block, you can check out these 13 ways to find blog post ideas :
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Use statcounter or google analytics to analyze your blog stats, figure out what works, and do more of it i.e look at your popular blog posts and come up with similar ideas. If the popular posts are about “nigerian celebrities photos”, then post more celebs photos. If it’s about free downloads, then offer more free downloads.
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Expand short lists and publish counter-posts. If you’ve written about “12 ways to make money online in Nigeria” , you can come up with a post like “101 ways to earn online in Nigeria” which will include fresh ideas. And you can also come up with a post that will be like a counter-attack to a post you’ve written in the past. Let’s say you’ve written about “9 annoying things girls do on Facebook”, you can come up with a fresh post like “9 annoying things boys do on Facebook”. You dig?
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Share recent news and insights that will help your blog readers keep up with latest happenings in your industry. If you’re a mobile tech blogger, news about latest phones will be cool. Publishing news works no matter industry you’re in. You can source for news from Google News or use apps like feedly. Please, don’t copy and paste. Make the content unique.
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Check your blog comments for questions and opinions of your blog readers which you can turn into blog post. If you don’t have any luck getting blog post ideas from your own blog’s commenters, look at comments on other sites. This idea works fine for how-to blogs.
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Carry out some searches in Google and take note of search quesries suggested by Google autocomplete; a magical tool that smart bloggers use to come up with content ideas.
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Check out your competitor’s content. Figure out what you think was not really explained or covered then re-package it
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Track your keywords. Use monitoring tools like warble to track keywords. Warble sends email alerts of where the tracked keyword is been mentioned. This can help you discover what other people are discussing about the tracked keyword and from there, you can easily get idea for your next blog post.
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Talk about trending topics and current events. You can use Google Trends to track trending topics and write more about them as long as the trending lasts. Twitter trends also make sense.
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Ask your blog readers what they need help with and what their favorite posts in the past were. You can ask them – in emails, on social media, through blog comments, etc. See what the posts have in common and boom – you know what qualities your own content needs.
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Conversations on discussion forums like Nairaland, Reddit, Quora etc are also great sources for content ideas. Threads that attract lots of conversations, get posted again and again should give you ideas of content you should be creating.
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Paste the url of any of your existing blog posts into the URL field of the AdWords Keyword Planner to see keyword ideas based on what you’ve already written about and published.
I will stop here for now. So, over to you.
How do you come up with blog post ideas? Kindly share…