Depending on your definition, I’ve been blogging for 17 years. That’s a long time. In the last ten years, I’ve published thousands of posts on my personal blog, Beyond the Rhetoric, not to mention the countless others I have written for a number of other websites.
One of the most persistent challenges that I have had to face along the way is coming up with new and interesting topics for my blog posts. When you approach a certain niche, industry or vertical, you may have a deluge of ideas in the beginning, but the well can dry up pretty quickly. You need fresh ideas and the Internet is there to help.
Rather than write a blog post on something and then hope to find an audience for it, why not try going about it in exactly the opposite direction? Look for what people are already reading and searching for online and address their specific questions directly. Here are three tools to point you the right way.
Ubersuggest
When you enter any given keyword or keyword phrase into Ubersuggest, you are presented with hundreds of possible related keywords that extend on that term.
In this example, I tried looking for terms related to “Pokemon GO.” Perhaps I want to write a blog post on the mobile app in some way, but I’m not exactly sure how to approach it. Putting that in, I was offered such suggestions as:
- Pokemon Go beta
- Pokemon Go APK
- Pokemon Go gameplay
- Pokemon Gold
- Pokemon Go field test
Clicking on any of these suggestions reveals the option to expand that particular keyword suggestion, letting you dig deeper and deeper into longtail queries. When using Ubersuggest, you are also provided with two main options to further curate your list.
The first is for choosing the source of your suggestions. This defaults to Web, but you can also choose Images, Shopping, YouTube or News. The second option is for language and location. The English/United States combination will make the most sense for most websites, but your demographics will naturally vary.
Answer The Public
For people who might prefer more of a visual approach, querying “pokemon” in Answer the Public might be a little more attractive.
By default, Answer the Public will return results from the United Kingdom, so you might want to click on the pull-down menu from the homepage to choose the United States instead.
The results are depicted as an expanding circle. Your primary term is the center and then you get the next word one level out and the actual full query beyond that. These circles are organized as questions and prepositions. There’s also an alphabetical listing.
Some of the questions revealed here included:
- Which Pokemon game should I get
- What Pokemon is not a dragon type
- Where Pokemon Google Map
- How Pokemon eat their food
- Why Pokemon sucks
You can use these types of questions as a jumping off point for your own blog posts.
Yahoo! Answers
Yes, believe it or not, Yahoo! is still very much alive and kicking. In fact, Yahoo! Answers continues to be one of the most popular question and answer resources on the Internet.
Performing a search on Yahoo! Answers for Pokemon yields a text-heavy search engine results page. I would highly recommend toggling the “filter by time” attribute in the left sidebar, perhaps to the last month for more time-sensitive content.
Browse through the results and see if any of the questions could warrant further expansion or exploration. This is a great way to provide real value to your readers, because you could be taking a single line answer (that doesn’t really fully explain or answer the question) and fleshing it out to a much more comprehensive answer.
Another very popular Q&A site is Quora, but you will need to sign up for an account there to get full access. That’s one advantage of Yahoo! Answers: it’s publicly accessible without login.
Do you have a favorite tool for generating blog post ideas? Let us know by commenting below!