Let’s face the truth: even the most creative ad copy or giveaway can’t secure a happy and long-lasting relationship with your audience. 

However, valuable content can. It has the power to build trust and make people bookmark your website or subscribe to your newsletter.

To deliver genuine value, your content has to be interesting, useful, and regular — otherwise, you risk losing your readers. 

Being a content marketing expert, I know pretty well how challenging finding content ideas can be, so I’m here to help! In this guide, I’m sharing our secrets about how to come up with content ideas for your blog. 

Ready, steady, go!

How To Come Up With New Content Ideas For A Blog: Best Strategies

You’ll be surprised at the variety of ways of finding content ideas. 

Of course, some of them will work for you better, while some won’t at all — it all depends on your niche and audience. 

Below I provide the ultimate list of tried-and-true strategies for generating killer ideas for content creation.

1. Take a peek at your competition

One of the easiest ways to spark fresh content creation ideas is to take a glance at what your competitors are posting. 

However, I don’t mean that you have to copy their articles — browsing titles will normally suffice to get your creative juices flowing. Create a list of topics and think about how you could expand it with other related themes. 

Maybe you can share expertise your competitors fail to? Or perhaps you can provide some unique examples or use cases that will make your content stand out? A brief brainstorming session can do wonders.

Ahrefs can easily help you define the top pages of your competitors and get some insights from their content.

2. Explore forums

Bringing value is one of the key features of successful content. In other words, if you write about stuff that really interests people, you’ll very likely be blessed with whopping traffic, likes, and shares. 

“Hmm, how do I know what currently interests my audience?” you may ask. The answer is exploring forums — yes, they still exist and are extremely popular with millions of users around the globe.

There are a lot of forums that might come in handy, and most likely, you’ll easily find a batch of specialized forums covering the topic of your blog. 

One of the biggest and most popular forums of today is Quora. Here, people ask questions and expect to find answers about virtually everything, starting from cooking and lifestyle and ending with IT technology and politics. 

To get your free website content ideas, type in the topic your audience is interested in. See relevant questions? Great! Now grab the most relevant ones and turn them into exciting content for your blog.

3. Tap into social media

Social media is another awesome resource to spot fresh ideas for content creation. You can explore social media from different perspectives:

• Find out what your audience is interested in by checking what they post and what other pages they follow.
• Join Facebook groups related to your topic — take note of what they post and look into discussions to get an understanding of what folks are currently struggling with. Problems people are trying to solve can help you come up with excellent ideas for articles.
• Keep tabs on what people tweet. Twitter should be your mantra if you want to know what is popular right now. This platform has a high chance of becoming your number one tool for generating your content marketing ideas due to its being such an easily searchable platform. To dig deeper, you can follow trending hashtags and search terms via Tweetdeck.

4. Discover exciting content ideas on YouTube

YouTube can go a long way towards giving you major inspiration for producing new content ideas. 

For starters, you can hit on interesting ideas by watching the most popular videos from your industry or just taking a look at what people search on YouTube. 

Next, leverage user comments — you’ll spot the topics you can use for crafting engaging content.

5. Take advantage of specialized SEO tools

You can also turn to professional SEO tools to source your content marketing ideas, for instance, Semrush or Ahrefs. Besides providing meaningful insights into your website’s link profile, keyword rankings, and SEO health, such tools can be used for conducting keyword research.

Ahrefs provides a Content Explorer tool which allows to discover the trending topics based on the query. This feature is an excellent resource for developing new content ideas. For example, let’s enter the term ‘customer acquisition’ and see the list of the relevant blog post ideas.

6. Get help from Google

Maybe you didn’t even suspect it, but the Google search box can become your goldmine of great article ideas. 

It can help you in three surprising ways. 

1) First, start typing a query related to your topic in the search box and see what else people tend to look for. That’s how Google Suggest works:

2) Next, you can scroll down and find the related searches section at the bottom of the page:

3) Finally, explore questions people usually search on Google:

As you see, by typing just two words in the Google search box, we’ve managed to find over twenty content ideas for blogs that really appeal to internet users.

7. Share your personal experience

Share what you’re passionate about — storytelling is a powerful way to connect with your readers. Especially when you apply content marketing best practices.

For instance, if you run a travel agency, why not inject some personality into your blog by posting a gripping story about your first trip abroad? Or maybe you have some fun stuff you don’t mind sharing? 

You can also tell your personal secrets of success, share your favorite vegan recipes, or warn people of mistakes you made — your personal experience is the best source of unique article ideas for your blog.

8. Keep your eye on new developments in your niche

Regardless of the industry you are working in, there are always innovations and trends worth talking about in your blog. Although this method of generating website content ideas takes time and effort (you need to do some thorough market research from time to time), it’s really worth it. 

Firstly, you get out-of-the-box content creation ideas your competitors could simply overlook. In addition, writing about new developments inevitably adds value and authority to your blog. 

9. Focus on your product

You can get an enormous dose of inspiration by taking a closer look at the products and services you produce or sell. 

How are they actually produced? How did you get the idea to produce/sell your product (a great example of a personal story)? How can people use it? 

Let’s say you sell women’s shoes. Here are a couple of ideas for articles you can generate:

• How I transformed my childhood dream into a business
• 10 ways to wear pumps
• Behind the scenes: how our shoes are made

10. Conduct interviews with industry experts

Chances are that there are people in your industry who have a lot to share. 

For example, if you’re in the food industry, get in touch with a celebrity chef, or prepare a talk with one of your teachers if you run an online course. 

Without any doubt, interviewing experts is an effective way to add value to content marketing material for your business. However, this is something that can’t be done without breaking a sweat. 

For starters, you’ll have to reach out to the person you’re interested in, schedule an appointment, prepare questions, hold the interview, and finally write the finished product. 

Although it’s a bit of a demanding endeavor, you’ll get fresh and unique content no one will be able to copy.

11. Update your old posts

Take a look at your older posts. Is there anything you could add? Or perhaps things changed over time, and some information from your older post is not relevant anymore? Finally, maybe some new visuals can make it pop? Just imagine, updating your old posts can bring 260.7% organic traffic increase to your web pages!

Again, look into your competitors’ content related to the same topic and figure out what your old post lacks. What’s more, you can go pro and use SEO tools to add a bunch of trending keywords to your old copy to make it rank higher on search engines.

Conclusion

Writing good content calls for inspiration, and while there are days when nothing might come to your mind, a list of content ideas can be of great help. 

Still, if generating content ideas and crafting exciting blog posts is more of your weakness than your strength, we are here to give you a hand! At ReVerb, we provide professional content marketing services and can help you generate killer content ideas that drive engagement and sales.