Coming up with blog post ideas can be challenging.  In fact, it’s a real pain point for many bloggers regardless of their niche.

All you need is a little inspiration and the right focus to write your next great post.

Write What THEY Want

When coming up with your next post topic, you may consider what you feel like writing about, or what you’ve been thinking about.  If you do this you’ll get your next post out, but it won’t perform.

If you look to your readers, you will never struggle with your next post idea.

Don’t forget, your blog is a business.

There are a few ways to know what your readers want to read about.  One way I like to use is tracking what people search for when on my blog.  I do this with the use of a WordPress plugin called Search Meter.

Search Meter works with your blog’s internal search feature to track the exact queries people are searching with on your site.  This is incredibly useful data.  With this information, you can track the kind of info your visitors are looking for.  This makes for great new post ideas.

Another simple way to get ideas is to ask your readers.  It seems too obvious I know.

Just ask them what they would like your next post to be about or add a poll somewhere on your site to ask.  Also, you should do your best to encourage blog comments.  Visitors will ask questions and give you opportunity to interact with them.  Through this interaction you can get a better feel for what your readers are interested in and even ask them outright.

Find New Audiences

While you should stick to a specific niche, you can expand your post topics to anyone that might be interested in your field.  Without being so tightly focused on your niche, you’ll have an easier time coming up with new ideas for blog posts.  This will also help you attract new audiences.

You can turn to Google for info on these people.  Visitors who get to your blog through Google probably aren’t your regular readers, they’re strangers.  In other words, they’re part of an audience you haven’t reached.

You can use Google Analytics to figure out the organic search terms sending visitors to your site.  There are probably hundreds or even thousands of keywords sending you traffic that you never optimized a webpage for.  You can use this data to find excellent long-tail keywords  to target with new posts.  This way you’ll have new topics to write about and you’ll be getting your site more traffic each day too.

Google has made it harder to find these keywords since they started blocking a lot of that data.  Every search term that sends you a visit while a user is logged into a Google account is added to the “(not provided)” pool.  However, you can find a lot more of these keywords by using a plugin called SEO Search Terms Tagging 2.

After installing that plugin, make sure you enable it and turn off the option that adds the keywords to your posts.  Now you have another source of data for the search terms sending you traffic that can be used for new blog posts.

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