One of the biggest struggles bloggers have is coming up with good blog ideas. Especially when you publish multiple times a week, it can get to the point where you feel like you’ve written about everything and there’s just nothing left. But there’s no need to despair – there are solutions.

In this blog post, discover 10 effective tactics to come up with engaging blog ideas, any time you need them. 

How to come up with engaging blog ideas:

• Use your competitors for inspiration
• Do a product review
• Revisit old blog posts for inspiration
• Cover a topic from multiple angles
• Write about current news
• Do round-ups of awesome articles on various topics
• Write how-to guides
• Ask your audience for ideas
• Create round-ups of industry leaders
• Write about yourself/your company

Use the competition for inspiration

One of the best ways to come up with new blog post ideas is to take a look at what the competition is writing about – particularly the blog posts that have the most comments and shares on social media.

Check out some of your favourite blogs to see what they’ve written recently, or check out Twitter and other social networks to see what articles are being shared about.

To make things easier on yourself, subscribe to all of these different blogs using a tool like Feedly, so that whenever you’re out of ideas you can simply go through your feed and see what blog posts they are writing.

Another way to find great blog posts is to use a tool like BuzzSumo. With Buzzsumo, you can do keyword searches to find out what the best articles on that subject are. What’s great about BuzzSumo is that you get to see only the best content that gets the most shares and engagement on social media.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should copy others’ ideas; rather, use them as inspiration for your blog posts, where you can put your own spin on things and show your point of view.

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Product Reviews

Have you been using any great products, services or tools lately? If you’ve tried something new that you believe your audience might be interested in, write a full review detailing your experience, how the product can be used and what you think about it.

A thorough, unbiased review of a product or service that targets the same audience as you do can provide lots of value to your readers.

Revisit old blog posts

Another way to come up with blog post ideas is to revisit your older articles. In that list, there might be a few that could use a re-write. In many different industries, things continuously evolve and some of the blog posts you’ve written just a year ago, for example, could be irrelevant now, or out of date.

Look through all of your old blog posts and see which ones could be re-written to provide new information. Chances are, with all the content that we are constantly being bombarded with, even your most loyal readers have forgotten about your old blog posts.

If you do find some articles that you can re-write, make sure you bring new information to the table and not just copy your old posts.

You can also create a blog post that you re-write year after year; for example, a round-up of all the best tools, apps or events of the year.

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Think of different angles

There is another way in which you can use your old blog posts to come up with new ones – think of different angles in which you can tackle a subject that you’ve written before. This is something that is done all the time by really big blogs that have a lot of contributors and post new articles several times a day.

For example, let’s say you’ve written an article on how to get started as a blogger. Next, why not write about the most common mistakes blogging beginners make? Or, you’ve recently written a blog post about Facebook advertising; another angle that you could use is how you can use Facebook Insights to improve your advertising campaigns.

Current News

Although I definitely prefer to have blog post ideas ready well ahead of time, there have been times when I was struggling to find something new to talk about. One way to go about this is to check for any current news in your industry that you can talk about and give your own two-cents about.

Do a roundup of your best articles

Another way to make use of your older articles is to put together a guide that contains your best articles on a particular subject. Add an introduction and ending and a conclusion and make edits to make sure all of the information is up to date and that the posts are tying together nicely. For example, if you have multiple articles on Facebook marketing, you could put together a complete guide to Facebook marketing by tying them all together in the same blog post. Then, to really get the most out of your content, turn the guide into a PDF document and set it up as a subscription incentive so that your readers can download it and always have it at hand.

How-to guides

Everyone loves a good how-to guide as they provide lots of value to your readers. Think of all the things you can do well that your readers would be interested in as well, and create a how-to guide that’s filled with useful information, screenshots and practical examples.

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Ask your audience

If you have a relatively big audience that engages with you and reads your blog posts regularly, use social media or your blog to ask them what they would want to read about or would like to hear your opinions on.

You could find some really great ideas this way, or at the very least, some inspiration to help you come up with your own. The best part is that you’ll also know that it’s something your audience really wants to read about.

Round up of industry leaders

Another idea that can work for multiple articles, or a series of blog posts, is to think about a topic, such as content marketing or advertising, and ask industry leaders and influencers if they would like to give a quote that you can use in the article, in exchange for including their information and a link to their website.

With these types of articles, all you have to do is come up with a topic (as broad a topic as you like, really) or a specific question and then ask as many influencers and industry leaders as you can for their tips or answers.

It will take longer to put together this kind of article, but it will also take you less to actually write it. Not to mention, these types of posts have lots of extra benefits, including more shares and engagement on your blog and social media and they can also get more traffic than your regular blog posts.

Write about yourself and/or your company

When you’re completely out of ideas of what to write about, why not write something about yourself or other people your work with?

There are plenty of things that you can write about that your audience might be interested in. For example, you can tell them about the journey you took to get to where you are and include some advice from the things you’ve learned along the way. Another idea is to write about some specific experiences that you’ve been through, whether they be happy or extremely challenging.

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Conclusion

The best way to come up with lots of ideas for blog posts at one time is to gather the whole team together and brainstorm using the tips above. Spend 30 minutes or an hour brainstorming and you could gather enough blog post ideas to last you for months! How do you come up with new article ideas when you simply can’t think of anything? Let me know and please share 🙂