Never Run Out of Blog Post Ideas With These Simple Steps

Source: Neil Patel

I write multiple articles each day.

And these aren’t fluffy, 500-word posts, either.

Instead, they’re 2,500+ words after at least a few hours spent researching stats and examples to back up each point.

You might think I’d get burned out.

But what if I told you I had the opposite problem?

It’s true! I honestly have more ideas than I know what to do with.

So while I might write a few articles each day, I have at least twice that many ideas sitting in my notes, just waiting for me to catch up.

Do you want to have that problem, too?

It’s actually pretty easy if you follow the same six steps I use below.

Here’s how I keep the ideas flowing (and how you can do the same).

1. Use HubSpot’s blog topic generator for easy wins

Are you running low on ideas right now? Are you scraping the bottom of the barrel?

Then let me introduce you to HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator.

It’s hands-down one of my favorite ways to keep new ideas flowing. Here’s how it works.

After pulling up the tool, all you have to do is drop in a few nouns for whatever topic you’re thinking about at the moment.

For example, let’s say we want to write a new post on “Instagram marketing.”

So you simply type that in and check out the following responses you get:

Pretty good, right?!

My favorite is the middle one, “10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Instagram Marketing,” because it already gives you a clever hook to run with, too.

So, in addition to the title idea, you’re already off and running, tracking down competitive analysis tips to start piecing your article together ASAP.

The other ideas are also pretty good, and you can easily punch them up to make them a little more interesting.

For example, “20 Myths About Instagram Marketing” is OK. But what about, “20 Myths About Instagram Marketing Sabotaging Your Results.”

See? A little better already. And it only took you a few seconds to turn a C+ headline into an A-.

“That’s great,” you think. “But Neil, how do you come up with these topics in the first place?”

Here’s one place to start.

2. Use Answer The Public to find hot topics

Answer the Public takes basic keyword idea and returns dozens (if not hundreds) of results based on what real people are already looking for in your location.

This idea plays off one of the best ‘under the radar’ keyword research tips out there: Auto Suggest.

For example, when you start typing something into Google or Bing, the search engine automatically gives you suggestions based on what other people search for.

So if you start typing “Starbucks,” you’ll see the Auto Suggest dropdown appear:

The reason this is so powerful for a marketer is that it’s hinting at the user intent behind why someone is searching.

In other words, it gives you a snapshot of someone’s motivations or emotions.

Answer the Public does something similar, but times 100.

Here’s how it works.

Pull up the website and drop in any based topic or idea, like “Content Marketing.”

After hitting “Get Questions,” you’ll be taken to a data visualization page that will start displaying all of the related questions people most frequently use.

For example, “content marketing” returns 82 questions right off the bat that you can either export or save to keep working.

Scrolling down a little will show you how these questions are often separated or grouped into what-, how-, why-, when-, where-, are-type questions.

Then, underneath each of those are a new ‘branch’ of related questions.

Many of these are even already in a perfect blog post headline format. Check out the following:

• What is content marketing infographic
• How much does content marketing cost
• How to measure content marketing
• How does content marketing affect SEO
• Why content marketing for B2B

Let’s zoom in a little bit to find even more high-quality ideas:

And that’s just one section of questions!

We’re still in the “questions” section, and we already have a ton of new blog post ideas.

But if you keep scrolling down, you’ll be able to quickly find a few more.

For example, head down to the “prepositions” next:

Let’s zoom in again so you can see these in detail:

You could write a blog post about every single one of those ideas!

Honestly, you could stop right here and probably have enough blog posts ideas for the rest of the month.

But let’s keep going to show you a few more techniques, including how you should start prioritizing all of these ideas.

3. Use BuzzSumo to steal trending ideas

So far we’ve been focusing primarily on evergreen blog post topics.

These are ones that stand the test of time, so the information should be as relevant a year from now as it is today when it goes live.

However, that leaves out a huge gap for an emerging category of new keywords that won’t show up under any of these blog post topic tools.

Here’s how to find those.

Pull up BuzzSumo and plug in a topic or URL.

BuzzSumo focuses on the most popular trending topics over the past few hours, days, weeks, and months.

For example, let’s type in NeilPatel.com to see what it shows:

In the upper left-hand corner, you can filter by date. We’ll choose one year for this example.

Now, over on the right-hand side, you can see sharing metrics across many of the most popular social networks.

Want to see something trending the last week? All you have to do is go back and change the original filter, like this:

Searching by topic will display all of the most popular formats for that keyword. For example, let’s take a…

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