One of the most frustrating things with producing consistent content can be the ability to develop enough topics and ideas for your posts.
Many people have no problems for the first 50-100 posts, but after that find they’re unable to come up with good ideas, and waste a lot of time thinking about the perfect post than executing on any of the thousands of potential topics out there.
My goal for this post is to convince you that coming up with topics is easy, you just need to develop a good method for doing so.
List Broad Topic Areas
It may seem counterintuitive, but one of my best tricks for developing solid post-topics is to think about larger topics areas I want to cover. If you have a new site, I recommend keeping this list to about 5 topics, but as your site grows you can always expand and add more.
I’ll use this post title as an example: “Tips to develop a good blog topic list” is a specific example of a post-topic, and the title alone doesn’t help me come up with very many other post ideas.
However, my topic area for this post is the much broader subject of content production, and if I think for a minute about content production topics, I could easily list a few dozen more specific topics for individual articles.
Review Your Old Posts
If you’re stuck in coming up with new ideas, you can always use content you’ve already created in order to get to that next post.
Your blog is already full of great ideas. How many times have you written an article and, while writing thought: “oh I could go into way more detail on this?” Well, that’s the point. If you review an old post or two you can isolate a few phrases, sentences, or list elements that you can expand on.
Read Your Competitor’s Blogs
I want to be clear that I’m not telling you to copy the content your competitors are producing. But, if you read some of the other blogs in your field, chances are you’ll be able to get ideas for other posts.
There might be a point the author makes that you disagree with, or that makes you think: “Yes, but…”
Those types of thoughts should be a sign that there’s potential for an additional post. Even other reader comments can be expanded into full articles. Get the picture?
Keep a Running List
Finally, the most important technique I use to make sure I never run out of blog ideas is to keep a running list of topics that pop into my head.
Mostly, these topics come to me when I am NOT trying to think of topics. Ironic, I know, but your mind works best when it’s relaxed.
Whether you’re browsing the web, writing a separate article, or even just walking down the street, jot down topic ideas in the moment they come to you.
No matter how you source the post-idea, the point is simply to keep a long, active list. Then when you sit down to write, you don’t have to think about what you’re going to write about, only what you have to say.