Welcome to this post in which you will learn 12 killer ways on how to find free content ideas for your blog.
**This article is a guest post by Sam Nelson from Five Star Funnel, Sam’s blog is a great place to find practical information on affiliate marketing and related topics.
If you blog regularly, you will run out of content ideas at some point. This is called “writer’s block” and it’s totally natural. In fact, it’s a good sign because it means that you are covering a lot of topics!
However, it’s important that you don’t just give up and stop writing. Instead, you should be looking for new content ideas. And this post will help you do exactly that!
If you haven’t yet started your blog and would like to, make sure to check out how to start a blog in 10 easy steps.
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12 Killer Ways on How To Find Free Content Ideas For Your Blog
1. Check Out Your Competition
Everyone has competition.
As much as you may not like your competition, you may as well use them to your advantage. Your competition will always have a couple of topics covered that you don’t.
This means they are a content idea gold mine. Take a look through their blog and find topics that you haven’t covered yet, then just do a better job than them!
In case, you think you don’t have any competition:
- Check out the blogs that rank higher than you for some keywords.
- Check other blogs in your niche or even niches that cross over in your niche
Take a look and you will always find some content ideas. A lot of blogs are over 10 years old and post on a consistent basis. If they can consistently come up with new content ideas, so can you.
2. Free Content Idea Tools
Our second method is to use free content idea tools.
There are tons of different ones, but they’re all pretty similar. Usually, you type in a keyword and the tool either spits out a bunch of ideas or it shows you some of the best performing content.
Here are some free content idea tools that you could use:
Sometimes they may give you ideas that don’t make sense. However, you can still use them, but turn them into a title that makes sense.
For example, the portent tool idea generator gave me this idea: “How affiliate marketing can improve your relationships”.
I could then turn that into “How Affiliate Marketing Can Improve Your Digital Marketing Skills”. So, you may have to do some switching, but it will still help you come up with new content ideas.
3. Look For Content Gaps
My next tip is to look for content gaps.
Have a look at your existing posts and try to find gaps that you have not yet covered. Maybe you linked out to somebody in the past, when you can create a much more relevant resource on that topic.
Or you may have covered two similar products in terms of reviews, but you never created a direct comparison. You would be surprised how many content gaps you can often have.
This can also help you become closer to that #1 resource that you are aiming to become.
By filling the gaps, you will slowly but steadily build your site out to cover a tremendous amount of topics in your niche.
4. Ask Your Audience
Who are you mainly writing for? Who is it that will read your content the most?
Of course, it’s your audience. They’re the ones supporting you and often they want something really specific covered that you haven’t covered yet.
This is a great opportunity to help your audience while getting free content ideas.
Now and again, just ask your following on social media or your email list. Often, you can get tons of ideas that your audience will love. It’s simple, but it’s also an effective method to get free content ideas.
5. Create Different Types Of Posts
There are so many different types of posts that you could make. Chances are, there are some types that you have never tried.
Or, if you have then there are probably some types that still have a lot of gaps.
To give you an idea of what I am talking about, here are some ideas:
- List posts
- Reviews
- Curated posts
- Your Experience Doing X posts (i.e I tried X for one month & similar)
- Product vs. Product posts
- Best Of [Your blog]
There are so many different kinds of posts that you could do.
Note down those post types above and if you ever can’t think of a content idea, take a look at them and you should find one.
12 Killer ways to find content ideas for your blog.6. Breaking Down Or Forming Long-Content
My next tip is to break down or form really long content.
Let’s start with breaking down long content. What I mean by this is looking at some big authority sites in your niche that rank for high-competition keywords. Often, these posts can be 5000, 7000 or even 10,000 words.
For example, if you were in the “dropshipping” niche, an authority site may have an “ultimate guide to dropshipping” that covers:
- What is dropshipping
- WooCommerce vs Shopify
- Picking a niche
- Finding profitable products
- Getting your store set up
- How to promote your dropshipping store
- Tips to improve your conversions
You could then have a look at their monster-article and break it down into one, two, three or even four posts (depending on the length).
This also works vice versa, you can take a look at the topics of multiple different articles and turn them into the topics of your ultimate guide.
7. YouTube Videos In Your Niche
YouTube videos are often pretty similar to blog posts. They are both (usually) detailed long-form content.
That means you can use them to get inspired and find content ideas. Just take a look at some channels in your niche, see what they are posting and often you can find some unique content ideas.
Of course, your blog content would have to be different, but that’s the whole point. Your content should be unique, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get inspired by YouTube videos.
8. Look For New Experiences
People love to hear about experiences. Your audience probably does too.
By looking for new content ideas that are related to your niche, you can often turn them into engaging content ideas. Let me give you an example, in case it doesn’t make sense.
Let’s say you are blogging about blogging. You could for one month, post a new blog post, every single day.
At the end of the month, you could post something like this:
There are so many different ways you could do this and it depends on your niche to find fitting experiences. However, I think it’s fair to say that in most niches you will be able to fit in some sort of experience post like the one above.
9. Use Quora For Content Ideas
In case you didn’t know, Quora is the biggest question and answer platform in the world.
Any topic you can name is probably covered there. That also includes your blog’s topics. By just scrolling through your blog’s topics/niche, you will be able to find some questions that are related to your niche.
Once you have a question, you can just write an in-depth response post about that question. You could even go one step further and answer the question on Quora and link out to your guide for a more detailed answer.
This will not only help you get free content ideas, but also free traffic.
10. Engage In Related Forums
Forums can be a great way to get content ideas.
It’s like a mixture of Quora and checking out your competitors. Why?
Users ask questions that you can answer through blog posts and users may also speak about content from other blogs. If the forum allows links to relevant content, you could also use them for traffic, just like Quora.
In case you don’t know about any relevant forums, just do a Google search for: [your niche] + forum.
Or, you could also head over to Reddit, as almost any topic is covered over there.
11. Look For Blog Post Idea Lists
Similar to tools that give your blog post ideas, there are also blog posts that list ideas.
I searched Google for some the other day and I found multiple posts with over 100 blog post ideas.
The ideas are usually quite general and can be applied to any niche.
12. Social Media
If your social media accounts are based around your blog niche, then you can probably get some ideas from there too. Often, somebody will make a post about a certain topic and you’ll be able to snatch that idea and turn it into a killer blog post.
Similar to Quora, when somebody you follow has a related question, you can do the same too. I’m not saying use social media as your main source of content ideas, but if you are keeping an eye out for opportunities, then you will find some.
Things to look out for on social media that can contain content ideas:
- Questions related to your niche
- Your competitors content being shared
- Long-form posts that can become a whole blog post
And as we mentioned earlier, you can also ask your followers if they want anything specific covered.
Killer Tip: Pinterest is full of bloggers. By just searching around in your niche, you will get plenty of ideas! If you need help with cleaning up your Pinterest account, take a look at how to clean up your Pinterest account.
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Final Words
That’s it!
I hope that you have found some value in this post, alongside some new ideas to get some blog post ideas.
If you have any questions or thoughts about this post, feel free to leave a comment. We will get back to you as soon as possible!
**This was a guest post by Sam Nelson from Five Star Funnel.
**You can also get in touch with Sam over on Twitter.
David Woutersen
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It can be a massive headache when you’re blocked. Right now I seem to be suffering more than I ever have… the are strange days indeed when we’re all trying to get a handle on working from home.
I’d add that if you don’t have a large audience you could look for questions in forums related to your topics and publish detailed answers to them in a series of blog post. I’ve also recently broken down my own long form posts (I don’t have that many!) into more detailed explorations of each topic point.
Hi Paul, those are some great additions indeed, breaking up content is a great way to double down on your expertise and provide a ton more value in your content.