11 Easy Ways to Find Content Ideas for Your Blog

Even a simple concept like “write what you know” may not help when you have already written dozens of articles for your blog and are faced with the issue of finding new ideas for articles. We have collected 11 easy and free ways to find ideas for blogs on various topics and covered how to choose the best ideas from among them.

How to find an idea for a blog article

If you can’t come up with an idea yourself, then the following sources will help you come up with a topic for your next articles:

Let’s explore each method in more detail.

Google SERP

Searching for topics on Google is one of the simplest and most effective options. At the stage of creating a blog post, you have already devised keywords and phrases that characterize your topic, which means you can type them into the Google search bar and study the recommendations from the search engine.

For example, you can type the query “vacation in Mexico” into Google and the system algorithms will immediately offer a dozen results:

Among these search results, you will see various blocks, such as ads, featured snippets, articles, etc. Study them to understand how and what others have written.

You can use the “People also ask block” as a source for ideas or you can research what other queries are suggested for your request:

In addition, we recommend that you scroll down on the page to the “Related search block”:

In this block, you can get even more ideas if you type a suggested related search and repeat the analysis of those search queries.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a free service from Google that allows you to follow trends. If you want to find relevant topics for your blog, Google Trends is the perfect tool to find the hottest and most discussed topics.

When you go to the main page of Google Trends, it is very easy to get confused, since trending topics are scattered chaotically, but you can type your request and view suitable trends:

At the bottom of the page, you’ll see “Related Topics” and “Related Queries”. These will give you an idea of what people are looking for in your topic right now:

As with the Google SERP, you can use Google Trends to find topics for any blogs. The service is not tailored for a specific niche, but, of course, has a bias towards trending events.

In addition to searching for a topic in Google Trends, you can find out whether your topic is interesting to a potential current audience by looking at the charts:

Pay attention to the large number of settings that allow you to customize your analysis. For example, if your website is not for a US audience, you can select a different geographic range and view detailed statistics for that range.

News Feeds

This method is not suitable for all blogs, since information in news feeds is always somehow related to current events. If you write exclusively on evergreen topics, this method will not be very helpful. Nevertheless, in news feeds, you can find a lot of ideas and learn about changes in the requirements for entering a certain country as well as how to update your previous publications or prepare new ones.

You can monitor both specific news websites and track news in the news feed. For example, in Google, there is a separate search for news:

In the “Settings” and “Tools” section, you can more precisely specify your request and get more suitable content ideas for your blog:

Competitor Monitoring

It is possible and even necessary to spy on your competitors’ topics and explore those topics more fully and expertly on your blog. This can be done by hand or using software.

Collect a list of your main competitors (everyone has them) and regularly observe what they write about. You can track this information manually or set the RSS readers or other software to provide you with fresh updates.

If you have a young site with a small number of articles, you can check not only your competitors’ new articles, but also their old ones, since there may be a lot of useful ideas among them as well.

If you take ideas from your competitors, be sure that your content is better than theirs. Otherwise, why create it? Your content must be better for both your readers and for the search engines. For example, your material may answer a question more fully and concisely or may contain more relevant information, and so on.

Ahrefs Content Explorer is an awesome search tool that allows you to find the most popular content, which you can use to discover new ideas as well. To find blog content ideas, you need to:

The results obtained need to be analyzed further, since there will be many ideas among them, which are sometimes repeated or even similar to those of your website.

Social Networks and Forums

Social networks and forums are great places to find out what’s interesting to people. You can search Facebook for a topic you want to learn more about or you can join large communities and monitor them regularly.

In many groups, you will be able to simultaneously determine what is interesting to people (based on their questions) and discover what’s new in your niche, as moderators often share important news and articles from other sites.

Forums are likewise a great source of data. It’s worth starting with the Reddit community or Quora. While not forums, these are platforms on which millions of people communicate every day. You will discover people’s actual needs, which you can later satisfy on your site by writing quality content.

Websites in Foreign Languages

Most major topics are in demand in different languages, although there are some differences between countries. Therefore, you can look at ideas for articles on foreign websites.

The easiest way is to type a topic into a Google search in another language that you know and check what foreign websites are writing about. If you do not know other languages, then you can still easily check foreign websites with the help of Google Translate, which allows you to translate entire pages:

Please note that there are specificities within each country. Therefore, you will have to at least adapt your content to the needs of your audience. For example, if you have a website about cars, some topics from other countries may not be suitable, as the car model range may be different.

Blog Post Idea Generators

This method is relevant, but it is not in last place without reason. You can find many theme generators on the net. Here are just a few of them:

The post idea generators do work, but the efficiency is not very high. Among the proposed topics, there are a lot of options that are not even worth writing about. However, generators can be used as a source of inspiration.

Bonus: 3 Non-obvious methods for finding content ideas

The previous eight ideas are used by many webmasters, but there are also less obvious sources for inspiration:

Whichever way you choose to find ideas for blog content, it is important to select the best topics that make sense to write about.

How to choose the best idea for an article

You can come up with a great idea that will not generate traffic and income in the future. Therefore, before writing an article, you need to study your idea in the following parameters:

You will be surprised when you find a topic that is interesting to you that may not be of interest to your audience at all.

All you have to do is use Google Keywords Planner or its alternatives and check how many people are searching for your topic each month:

If the total traffic is less than 100 people per month, you should skip this topic or write an article as short as possible to avoid wasting a lot of time on a post with low traffic potential. Another way is to combine several unpopular, but related topics and create one article that includes them all.

However, the more traffic there is on a topic, the more competition there usually is. After all, everyone wants to get visitors, which they can then convert into income. Therefore, you need to analyze your competition. To do this, you can use tools like Ahrefs, Serpstat, and their alternatives. You can simply check the query in Google by typing the main queries for your article and see which pages appear in the SERP:

If there are many homepages or the official sites of companies and highly trusted services, such as TripAdvisor, in the search results, then consider whether your site and page have a chance to compete for the first page. Maybe it’s better to choose a less competitive topic. However, you can still opt to fight for higher traffic if you make your page no worse than the one that is already at the top of the search results.

To compete in topics with high-potential traffic, your articles must be the best answer to a reader’s question. Thus, it is ideal if you personally understand the topic or have an author who can prepare high-quality material. If there is no such knowledge, then a compilation of knowledge from other sources (written uniquely!) and a more convenient presentation of the material may still work.

Of course, if your strategy for attracting traffic includes mainly other traffic sources, such as social networks, then the analysis of the topic must be built in a different way, especially if your chosen topic already generates traffic from your existing traffic sources. For example, if you have a large social media group for Honda car repairs, an article about children’s toys, regardless of its high monthly searches, is unlikely to generate a lot of traffic to your group about Honda cars.

The last point, but no less important, is to evaluate how you can monetize future articles. If your site has contextual advertising, such as Google Ads or display ads, and your goal is exclusively to generate more traffic, then even here it is better to focus on commercial topics, as there is a higher chance of getting a more expensive click.

By collecting people on your site who need a certain product or service and are ready to buy, you can earn a lot more.

For example, when writing about how to get compensation for a delayed flight, you can earn through both contextual advertising and the sale of law services. While writing about a solo trip to Hawaii, by placing affiliate links, you can earn money on visitors booking hotels or purchasing flight tickets. Affiliate links are available for almost any topic. For example, the owners of travel sites can join the Travelpayouts affiliate network and get access to 80+ affiliate programs, including Booking, GetYourGuide, and others.

You can assess the commercial potential of a topic by analyzing user intent based on the keywords he/she is searching for. There is no one-stop service that will do this for you. Of course, if the queries contain the words “Buy”, “Book”, etc., then the intention of the user is obvious, but not all blog article ideas can be tailored for such queries.

You can logically evaluate if a person needs something or not. For example, in the article about “Reliable suitcases for travel”, it is logical to assume that a person reading that article is in search of a suitcase, which means the topic has the potential to earn money from affiliate marketing, for example, through the Amazon affiliate program.

By using all of the above methods, you will be able to find great topics for future articles on your blog. However, if you have tried everything and a topic idea has not yet come to you, perhaps you need to take a temporary break from content creation or hire an editor to help you with content production.

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