This is a common problem that happens to just about everybody at some point in time. The more you struggle with forcing an idea, the worse the problem gets.
The first step is to RELAX. Don’t stress. Just get comfortable – ideas tend to flow when you are unrestricted and peaceful. Find your “zen” place.
Second, there are lot of great online tools that I and other bloggers use to come up with new ideas. You can use these simple tools to help get your creative juices flowing if you happen to find yourself struggling for what to write. Here we go:
GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER
The Adwords Keyword Planner or Google Keyword Planner, whatever you want to call it, is a tool from Google that will help you come up with some ideas to write about on your blog. You’re also helping set the foundation for your blog to receive increased search traffic by including keywords that people are searching for.
This strategy works to help break through your writer’s block by showing you what people are searching for, related to your blog, and how often they are searching for it each month. That information gives you an easy way to see the topics you should be covering with your blog, and helps let Google know what your blog is about — helping you tap into your share of that coveted search engine traffic.
All you have to do is write a blog post around the keyword, solving the problem or providing the answers that the searcher is looking for, and let Google take care of the rest. Link is here.
BUZZSUMO
BuzzSumo gives you ideas for blog posts to write about, but also gives your social media marketing campaign a head start. This tool gathers all of the blog posts and articles related to the keywords you enter and sorts them based on the amount of social shares they’ve received since they were published.
As you read through the results that BuzzSumo returns when you enter your keywords, you’ll start to gather ideas about what you should be covering with your blog posts, and how to write in a way that your audience will respond to. This makes it a lot easier for you when you actively start promoting your blog on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and more. Link is here.
QUESTION & ANSWER SITES
Sites like Quora and Yahoo! Answers are chock full of new blog posts ideas waiting for you to dig through. These two sites, and others like them, allow users to submit questions that the general public are able to answer. The answers that other users leave for the original poster are then rated, and sorted by the best answers first.
Having data that’s easily accessed and sorted by outside users gives you both the idea for the problem you need to solve, provided by the question that was originally asked, as well as what other users consider the best answer — giving you an idea how to angle your blog post for the most effect.
FORUMS & SOCIAL MEDIA
If you’ve spent any amount of time on social media platforms, or forums where your customers and readers hang out, you have probably already seen the sheer volume of questions that get asked on a daily basis. If you’re not already active in the communities where your potential readers and customers are at, you need to find them and get active. You can search for forums on Google, and communities on Facebook.
When you see the same question coming up on a regular basis, instead of providing a short answer in the group you’re a part of, or on the forum that you’re active in, try providing the complete solution to their problem in the form of a blog post. This will introduce your blog to a new group of readers, reinforce your message with the reader’s who have already seen you, and give you an increased presence in the communities you’re hanging out in.
ASK YOUR READERS.
If you already have a foundation of readers on your blog, one of the best ways to come up with new topics to cover is simply to ask them what they want to see. Sites like SurveyMonkey will let you create surveys you can send to your audience to find out exactly what they think, and learn a bit more about who they are.
If you don’t already have a list of email subscribers, or a steady stream of visitors to your blog that would make giving a survey worth your time, there is one more method you can use to figure out what your readers and customers want to see.
CHECK WITH THE READERS OF LARGE BLOGS.
Find the biggest blogs in your market that you can and make a list of them. This is going to be a wealth of information for you to dig through. After you’ve gathered a list of say 10, 15, or 20 of the bigger blogs in your niche, start pulling them up one, by one.
Most blogs will have a popular posts section, or widget, that you can use to sort all of the posts on the site by the posts with the highest comment count. After finding the most popular posts on the blog, read the article and then start looking through the comments. Pay attention to what the readers are saying and how it relates to the article.
This will help give you a better understanding of exactly who your readers and customers are, and the ability to help better serve up the types of blog topics that they really want to see.
WE HOPE THIS HELPS! IF YOU ARE JUST STARTING OUT BLOGGING AND DON’T HAVE YOUR VERY OWN BLOG AND DOMAIN BUT WANT TO GET STARTED, HERE IS A LINK TO MY ARTICLE STEP BY STEP WALKTHROUGH ON SETTING UP A BLOG: HOW TO SETUP YOUR OWN BLOG IN 4 EASY STEPS
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