The dreaded blank white page. Joe has been staring at it frustratingly for hours. His fingers are all stretched, eager to start typing, but he can’t even figure out what his topic should be about.
What’s worse? Just minutes ago he was so inspired after having read an amazing blog post about how other writers are cranking out 10 thousand words daily, yet here he is right now, he can’t even get the title down.
Sigh… “The pain is real indeed,” he says to himself.
Are you struggling with the same things that Joe is struggling with right now? Are you running out of topics to write about for your business blog? If you answered those two questions with a “yes”, then you’re in the right place.
With the tips that I’ll share with you in this guide, you’ll never run out of topics to write about on your business blog – ever again.
Let’s hop right in.
1. Head to Q&A sites to look for topics that are getting a decent amount of interaction.
Q&A sites are such a goldmine. Not only will it help you with generating content ideas, but it can also tell you if the content ideas that you have at hand are something that your audience would really like to read about.
When you go to Q&A sites, all you need to do is to type in a keyword that’s closely related to your niche and see what questions or topics are getting the most answers or comments.
Of course, the more interaction there is in a topic (or a specific question), the more ideal it is for you to write about it since it is already somewhat proven that the people love reading about it. Otherwise, why would it receive social validation like shares, likes, and comments (among others), right?
2. Do a quick survey on your community.
Be very careful with how you use this strategy. Otherwise, you just might sound like you’ve ran out of ideas and are looking to get your community to do the heavy lifting for you.
The key here is on how you frame your survey. Don’t run it as if you’re doing the survey because you aren’t sure what to write about. Instead, position your survey in such a way where you’re conducting one to know what kind of problems your audience are facing right now. That way, you can prioritize the blog topics on your content calendar accordingly based on how urgent the topics are to your audience.
This kind of approach will make it sound like you’re running the survey out of concern for your audience, more than anything else.
3. Visit websites offering online courses.
You’ll hit two birds in one stone using this strategy. That’s why almost all of my clients love using this.
First, you’ll be able to uncover TONS of value packed ideas to blog about. Second, you’ll be able to strategically sequence the order of the topics, making it easier for you to pace the transfer of knowledge from your brain, to your audience’s.
After all, it won’t do you any good to share these golden nuggets of knowledge to your audience, if they can’t even absorb the ideas properly because you weren’t using the proper pacing.
That’s where websites offering that are offering online courses come into play.
When visiting these websites, you’ll see their course’s curriculum and see whether or not people are subscribing to it, whether or not others like it (through its ratings), and what others are saying about it (through the comments).
Head to ZeoLearn you’ll have a clearer idea of what I’m talking about. Once on their website, you’ll immediately see their courses, the ratings of the courses, how many comments each course have, and how many users have subscribed to it.
The best part is, when you click any of the courses, it will take you to the curriculum that will be discussed on the specific course.
That right there is the goldmine.
You can blog about the specific topics of the course, and follow how the topics are laid in order.
* Note – be sure to pick the courses with the most number of subscribers, and those with really good feedback. It is social proof that your audience likes the topics being discussed in the course.
4. Peg your article topics against your monthly / weekly themes.
The idea is, if your content ideas aren’t a good fit to the theme that you determined on your content calendar, then you can easily scrap the idea (for now) and focus on the ones that will add consistency to your content calendar’s theme.
As for the ideas that aren’t a good fit for your content calendar, remember to store them someplace else. That way, you’ll have a bank of content ideas that you can draw out from if you’re running out of ideas.
You can also revisit your content bank of ideas when creating your new content calendar. By doing so, you won’t have to start from scratch when thinking about the topics. If you see anything that fits the new theme, then you can just use it.
5. Spy on your competitor.
While there are several tools that you can use to spy on your competitors, I use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer for it.
The tool is quite easy to use, all you need to do is to login at Ahrefs, go to their Content Explorer tab, type in your competitor’s domain name then hit “search”.
The tool will then show you your competitors articles (or webpages) and the statistics of each page. You can see the page’s number of Tweets, Facebook shares, backlinks, etc…
By now, I hope you can see where this strategy is headed. I mean think about it, since you and your competitors have the same target audience, there’s a good chance that whatever they wrote about that has TONS of shares or backlinks will also garner you the same results.
That being said, all you need to do is to write about the things that your competitors wrote about that had great results. Of course, you shouldn’t simply copy their ideas. You can add your own twist to to your articles. You can combine the ideas of 2 – 3 good performing articles so you’ll have an epic post to share to your readers.
6. Use title generators.
You can bet your family jewels that there are several other title generators on the web, however, these 3 are my favorite:
There isn’t much that I can tell you about these tools except that they get the job done when it comes to helping you with article ideas.
That being said…try them.
What’s next?
Don’t let the frustration of not being able to decide which topic to write about ruin your day. You can use the ideas that I shared above to give you the push that you need to get started.
Once you’ve started cranking out the words, all you’ll need to do is to allow your creative juice to flow and see your word count skyrocket at lightning speed.
If you have any questions, ideas, or tips that you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section below. Cheers!
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