What Should I Blog About? 10 Tips for Finding a Blog Topic

The purpose of having a blog is two-fold. First, you want to be able to provide useful content to your existing or prospective customers on a regular basis. Second, you want to focus your blog posts around keywords and topics that are competitive in order to rank organically. The second purpose seems to be where most content marketers get hung up and need some help when it comes to finding a blog topic.

How Do You Find the Best Blog Topics?

As a blog writing service, we live and breathe this struggle every day, but we are here to help! Instead of banging your head against a wall trying to come up with new blog topics, here are 10 tips we use when finding a blog topic.

1. Keyword Research

While every blog you write is likely topic-based, good SEO practices mandate that you include relevant competitive keywords within your blog to give it the best chance of ranking organically.

I firmly believe that keyword research should be the first thing you do before you even start thinking about finding blog topics. There are many paid tools out there that can help you get a list of relevant keywords very quickly. Tools like SEMrush can also give you an at-a-glance insight into how competitive a relevant keyword phrase might be.

The KD% shows how competitive the keyword is. The higher the percentage, the harder it is to rank for that keyword organically.

But what if you don’t have a subscription to a fancy keyword research tool? Not to worry, Google is all you need, and it’s free!

Finding a Blog Topic Using the Google Search Bar

Google auto-suggest can be a great way to get some ideas on related keywords to the main word you type in. For example, if I know that one of my main keywords is “content marketing,” I can type it into the search bar to see what other variations of this keyword have been searched for.

After I have clicked to search for the term, I can also scroll down to the bottom to see searches that are related to the word I typed in.

This can help you to get a sense of other related keyword phrases that have to do with the main search query that you typed in. Doing this a few times can help you to get a blog topic list made in no time.

How to Find Blog Ideas Using Google Search Console

Every website owner should connect their website to Google Search Console if you haven’t already. Google Search Console is completely free to use and gives you statistics and warnings about your website that are crucial to making sure your website is working correctly in Google Search.

In the Google Search Console, you can look at search analytics data to view search queries that have been made to lead people to your site. This can help you to know what to blog about just by looking at the different queries in the list. Can you expound on any of these queries in your next blog post? Chances are you can, and you should in order to get even more organic visitors.

This method if finding a blog topic sometimes works better than using Google Analytics (also free) for one main reason. In Google Analytics, if the user is signed into their Google account when browsing your site, Google Analytics will not give you the keywords or queries your users type in, but will instead just give you a category called “not provided” with a number of visitors. Google Search Console, however, will show you a query list that led people to your site, which can be very helpful when finding a blog topic for your business.

2. Customer Questions

Your customers can be one of the greatest sources of blog topic material out there. If a customer is asking a question about your service or product, it usually means that you don’t have content out there regarding their concern.

If you are in the e-commerce industry, doing a quick search on Amazon for your product can turn up a bunch of questions that customers have answered. For example, on the following listing for a minimalist wallet, you could easily write blog content on RDIF blocking protection to help protect credit cards that have RDIF chips.

When a customer asks a question, it can oftentimes be the main reason why they haven’t already purchased your service or product. By creating blog topics around the questions they are answering, you can help to close more deals as the obstacles of questions can be removed with answer-focused content.

3. Analyze Old Blog Content

Chances are you have already put out some really great content on your blog. If so, you automatically have an easy source for finding a blog topic for your next piece of content.

Go to your Google Analytics and go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages to see the most popular pages on your site.

Seeing a list of your best performing blog content can help you to think of ways to supplement it with companion blog topics and posts. Looking at the example above, if the top performing post is about how to correctly use APA Style Title Case, I could create a series of blog post topics about other APA Style rules that are helpful when writing.

4. Repurpose Content

Using the same method as tip #3, you can take blog content that is already performing well and completely repurpose it to come up with new blog topics. What do I mean by this? For example, you could take existing content and turn it into:

• A slide deck that you can post on slideshare.net
• A podcast
• An instructional video
• An infographic
• An interactive quiz
• An FAQ

This is a great way to get the most bang for the buck for existing content while also saving you some time from having to come up with completely new blog topic material. Finding a blog topic becomes easy when you’ve already done it once before!

Jay Baer has written an awesome post in where he explains how to get 8 pieces of content from a single piece of content.

5. See What Blog Topics Your Competitors Are Putting Out There

Going to your competitor’s blog is a great way to get some blog topic ideas. While going through them manually isn’t very hard to do in order to start compiling a list, there are faster ways to do this through a piece of software such as SEMrush or Ahrefs.

Either of these pieces of software allows you to analyze a domain’s traffic sources and what content on their site gets them the most traffic.

From the example above, I simply put in the domain nike.com to get an organic traffic report. SEMRush spits out a list of keywords and URL’s in descending order based on overall traffic percentage.

A report like this is great when finding a blog topic because it gives me the main keywords Nike is targeting and the URL to the content it lives on, which gives me insight into the blog topic they used with the keyword. I could read this content and see if I could create a more in-depth blog post on this same topic to see if I could glean some of the traffic they are receiving.

6. Use Everyday Experiences

Things happen in your life that can be used as inspiration for coming up with blog topic ideas. Did you attend a movie or play that made you think about something profound? Was there an interaction you had with a customer or employee that you could turn into a principle or story of what to do or not do as it relates to your business?

There is most likely something that has happened in your life that you can pick apart and create a blog post topic about. The key is taking some time to meditate and recognize the experiences that you have had and how you can turn them into blog post material by asking yourself these types of questions:

• How did your experience affect you?
• Was there something unique about the experience that was memorable? Why?
• Is there something about the experience you wish you could change? Why?
• What did you learn from the experience?
• Will this experience cause you to react differently in the future? Why?

Once you have asked yourself some thought-provoking questions, ask yourself the following million dollar question:

How does my experience relate to what I do for work?

I bet you’ll be able to find something about your everyday experiences that can relate to your products or services in order to come up with a great blog post topic. Give it a try!

7. Use Combined Relevance For Finding a Blog Topic

What is combined relevance? Combined relevance is when you take two seemingly unrelated things and present them in a way that connects them relevantly to your readers in a way they haven’t seen it before.

We really enjoy doing this here at BKA and they have been some of the most satisfying blog posts we’ve ever done on our own website.

For example, what do you get when you cross Stranger Things with backlinking?

Or, what do you get when you cross March Madness with meta descriptions?

What about crossing Star Wars with content creation?

These types of blog post topic ideas are just fun to do, and they can show your readers that you can be creative while also allowing your personality to shine through your writing.

8. Curate the News

One popular strategy that many content marketers use when finding a blog topic is to curate existing news stories. I am not talking about just copying and pasting news stories as that is incredibly lame and against Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

What I am talking about is creating a new piece of content that references a recent news story, but that gives your opinions on it.

Essentially you repurpose a news story to give insight into how something could be avoided by using your product or service, etc. This blog topic creation strategy is great for two reasons.

First, it makes coming up with a great blog topic easy, and second, you can ride the traffic wave on popular news stories for a short amount of time.

But how do you find news stories in your vertical? Google makes it easy with their News option on their search bar.

Simply type in the blog topic you want to search for, and then click the news option directly below the search bar to see news stories that are related to the term you typed in.

9. Ask Your Readers

One of the easiest ways to get blog topic ideas is by asking the most important group of people you can, your readers!

One of the simplest ways to ask your readers what they want more information about is by emailing them. While a personal email can work, you can use services such as MailChimp to add polling and other functionality to really spice it up and increase engagement.

“A dream you dream alone is a lonely dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”
– John Lennon

If email isn’t your jam, surveys are also a great way to get valuable information. Here at BKA, we do surveys all of the time, but we often will pair it with a contest or something to make it fun.

For example, if a writer or customer fills out our survey, they may be entered into a drawing for a new iPad. Offering them a chance to win something is a great way to spur engagement with surveys.

10. Answer The Public

This free tool is seriously one of the coolest things ever! This takes the auto-suggestions from Google and Bing and puts it on visualization steroids.

Instead of just getting a tiny list of blog topic suggestions, Answer The Public creates a robust visualization of the questions and buckets it into the basic questions of what, can, why, which, who etc.

For example, if I go to answerthepublic.com and search for questions related to “content marketing,” this is what it shows me.

Look at all of those questions! I now instantly have an insane amount of blog topics I can write about all revolving around relevant questions to my main search term.

How To Choose a Blog Topic Using Prepositional Terms

However, answerthepublic.com isn’t done with me yet. If I scroll down a little bit more, they give me prepositions of the main term I typed in to really get my creative juices flowing.

How To Get Blog Topic Ideas Using Vs. Type Content

Comparison content is also a great way to garner some quick blog content topic ideas. People love to see how things compare to each other so they can make the best decision possible.

Again, answerthepublic.com makes this incredibly easy with their comparison visualization.

Finding a Blog Topic Can Be Done!

As you see, there are plenty of tools and ideas out there to help you know what to blog about. Hopefully one of these ideas can help you to break the writer’s block you might be experiencing when finding a blog topic.

Still need help with blog topic creation? If so, we have you covered! We can make your life easy as our writers only need a keyword in order to create a relevant blog post. Check out our blog writing services and let us do all of the work for you.