How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas Your Audience Wants To Read

When I first started Limit Breaker 2 years ago, I had no idea what my potential audience wanted to hear, let alone how to come up with genuinely good blog post ideas.

I’d spend the majority of my time shooting in the dark, generating topics that didn’t get clicks or keep readers on my site. Essentially, I was guessing my way through my blogging journey, when instead, I should have been researching and applying techniques.

So, now that I’m a more experienced and skilled writer, it’s time to share those techniques with you. 

How to come up with blog post ideas

In this article, I’m going to fill you in on how I generate blog post ideas. I don’t just use one technique, so read all the way through to see which ones you can apply to craft your own blog post ideas.

Keep a notepad

The first one is the most obvious but it’s also one of the most essential.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been out and about and an idea for a blog post topic hits me. Then, instead of writing it down, I convince myself that I’ll remember it, only to forget it later.

Make sure you have a way to write your ideas down. It doesn’t have to be pen and paper, it could be a Google doc or a separate note on your phone – just make sure you do it.

Answer your target audience’s questions

It doesn’t matter how large or small your existing audience is, there’s always a way to find blog post topics from genuine questions they already have.

Look outside of your existing audience for this one, you have a target audience, so let’s find what they want to know.

Here’s an example, I want to find what common questions bloggers have so I can answer them in my posts. In this case, I’m going to use Quora to find them. Keeping things simple, if I type in ‘blog’ and hit ‘questions’, Quora generates real questions from real people, all of which can be used to create blog post ideas.

You don’t have to stop here, you can also use Reddit, Answer The Public, Facebook groups and Twitter to find genuine questions from your target audience.

Listen to your existing audience

There’s nothing more powerful than the audience you already have – no matter how small it is.

Working out what your existing audience would like to read more of is pretty simple but might take a little more time. The following techniques work well:

• Ask questions
  • In your welcome email, ask them what they’d like more information on
  • At the end of each existing blog post, encourage comments with questions
  • Personally email subscribers directly to get to know them
• Analyse your current posts
  • There’s nothing better than data, take a look at your Google Analytics to see which posts are doing well and create similar content 

Use a blog post ideas generator

Let’s take this a step further. Using a generator is an excellent way to use data and customer questions together to create blog post ideas that will not only answer your audience’s questions but hit the mark with SEO too.

TextOptimizer has a brilliant tool that does just that. I genuinely use it to help me create content that’s great for readers and SEO.

So let’s use our above example again, I’m targetting bloggers, so keeping it simple I’ll input ‘blog’. The results not only show me common questions but the number of people searching for them and how many sites create content based on them.

In this case, although my audience would find value in my answers to these questions, it would be very hard for me to rank highly for them in Google. 

So if I get a little more specific with ‘how to write better blog posts’, it will give me much better results.

Better yet, TextOptimizer allows you to use a limited version of their content ideas generator for free. Start using it here: https://textoptimizer.com

Don’t waste your time creating blog post ideas that don’t resonate with your audience. Instead, start using the tips above to create content they will find value in. Trust me, you’ll definitely notice the difference.

You might also like:

• How to Start Guest Blogging and Get Accepted Every Time
• How to Utilise Your Introvert Skills for Better Email Engagement
• What it really means to create value for customers and your audience

Featured image by Christina @ wocintechchat.com

Now you tell us, what techniques do you use to generate blog post ideas? Leave them in the comments below.