How to Come Up With Ideas for Blog Posts

Every minute there are millions of pieces of content uploaded to the Internet. This can make it so difficult for businesses to come up with ideas for blog posts that address the right questions and stand out from the crowd. Companies look to articles expecting to find something they can use in blog posts or examine industry trends. Then they try to create their own content in an improved or a distinctive way. If you don’t put the time and effort into creating a solid foundation and plan for developing ideas for blog posts, your content will fall short of stellar.

The best way to come up with stellar ideas for blog posts is by using our three pillars. Pillar number one, make sure that you cover all of your foundational bases. The second is to create a framework for rejecting bad ideas. And third, ask yourself questions that will help you during your brainstorming process.

The main takeaway from this post is that to produce genuinely relevant content, you must take the time to develop a strategy and framework. They should guide your blog post idea creation process through creative and unique avenues. You want to have a substantial impact on your clients, your in-house team, and your content creation goals.

Steps to Come Up With Ideas for Blog Posts

Let’s begin with pillar number one. Make sure you have all your foundational bases covered. This means you need to have a firm understanding of how to design a foundational blog post strategy. A strategy is foundational to blog idea creation because it guides your content in a meaningful, engaging, and sustainable direction that captivates your target audience. A solid content strategy makes the whole content creation process easier and more fluid.

46% of businesses with a documented content strategy indicate that their content marketing is very effective or extremely effective, according to the Content Marketing Institute. HubSpot created a very impactful article on how to create a prosperous blog strategy. They suggest asking yourself questions like, “Why does your blog even exist? Who are your ideal customers? Which of your competitors have blogs? Which keywords are you targeting? Which metrics matter to you?” These questions answer directly to SEO. We’ll talk more about SEO a bit later. In the meantime, here’s a pro tip – Content is the most crucial piece, SEO always follows.

Here’s a bonus tip for coming up with ideas for blog posts – Content marketing is a long-term and organic growth strategy. It takes time. But, eventually, you will see results. Set goals for yourself and leave room for growth.

Ideas for Blog Posts Pillars

The first pillar takes time and effort, but it will make the entire blog post idea creation process faster and more efficient.

This brings us to pillar number two, create a framework for eliminating bad blog post ideas. Charlie Munger, the famed partner of Warren Buffett, established a framework and mental model that he used to determine whether or not he should make an investment. Munger created a list of questions that both he and Buffett had to answer yes to every time before making an investment. The results? Well, let’s just say that Munger has a net worth of one point six billion dollars. Not too bad.

So we decided to mirror the same framework, which has actually kept us from chasing trendy or shallow ideas for blog posts. This framework basically says before moving forward with ideas for blog posts, we have to say yes to four main questions. So let’s move forward and walk through these questions so you can see how we apply them to this very blog post.

• Number one: Will this blog post immediately be beneficial to our customers and prospects? Yes, absolutely. Our customers and prospects often ask us how to come up with ideas for blog posts on their own.
• Number two: We ask ourselves, will this blog post immediately be beneficial to our internal team members? Absolutely. This blog post will now be a point of reference to use for their own knowledge and share with others such as customers, other colleagues, etc.
• Number three: Will this blog post be written on a topic that contains enough valuable information to where it could be packaged into something like a course, a course, someone would actually pay for? The answer to this one is yes. This topic is just scratching the surface on how to come up with stellar blog post ideas. Additionally, there’s a lot of demand for people needing assistance with developing ideas for blog posts. For example, maybe we down-sell this resource so a customer can build their own blog post as opposed to using our services to do it.
• Number four: Will this blog post be evergreen, meaning will it be relevant for our audience for years to come? Most definitely. The principles that we’re laying out in this blog post would have been useful 100 years ago and will still be helpful in 100 years.

Pillar number two is that your framework should guide you toward saying “yes” to ideas for blog posts that provide value, and “no” to blog post ideas that fall short of adding any benefit.

The third and final pillar – brainstorming questions. Ask yourself questions that will help you with your brainstorming process.

We use three questions that act as resources for finding meaningful and relevant information to inspire ideas for blog posts. Let me show you how we used these brainstorming questions to find the ideas for this very post.

1. The first question, “What is the most frequently asked question from your current content customers?” The number one question is, “can you guys help us with some ideas for new blog topics?” And while we do offer some assistance in this regard, we believe that the overall blog post strategy and idea creation process is best handled in-house.
2. The second question, “What is the most frequently asked question from your prospective content customers?” Well, coincidentally, our prospects also ask the question, “can you help us come up with some new ideas for blog topics?”
3. What does your team need to know in order to enhance your product or service in some way? We wrote this post to benefit our customers and prospects and benefit our internal team because they can also learn from it.

Ideas for Blog Posts: Other Opportunities

Again, since we don’t directly help in idea creation for our customers, we must provide resources for prospects that can help them. Ultimately, this will point to more opportunities for us. Always remember that your blog post doesn’t wholly exist to help generate organic traffic to your site.

Stellar blog posts can offer direct support to your sales team in closing sales. The reason we wrote this post was not only to benefit our customers and prospective customers but also to benefit our internal team because they too can learn from it. Let’s consider some examples of ideas for blog posts that both our in-house team and prospects could both jointly benefit.

• How can we standardize training for our writers? This would provide consistent, streamlined blog content that all of our writers could refer back to. The title of this post could be as simple as “How to Write a Stellar Blog Post.”
• How can we standardize training for our editors? We may develop an editing and proofreading checklist that provides for less back and forth between the writer and editor. We can title the post, “The Ultimate Editing and Proofreading Checklist.”
• How to build the best writing team? The best way to build a team is to know how and who to recruitOutsourcedhow to manage them. The post could be titled “How to Build an Amazing Team of Outsourced Content Writers: A Step-by-Step Guide.”

Let’s wrap this blog post up. Creating stellar content requires coming up with stellar ideas for blog posts that will have an immediate impact on your business and everyone around you.

Now, let’s go back to the first pillar. Remember when I suggested not to get too obsessed with SEO? If your content is valuable to your primary audiences, then your blog posts will unquestionably perform on their own. And all those search engine rankings and website traffic are essential for your business’s success. They are long-term goals that cannot be achieved without meaningful content.

Okay, so here are the three pillars again, just to recap: One, make sure you have all your foundational bases covered. Two, create a framework for eliminating bad ideas for blog posts. Three, ask yourself questions that will assist you in the brainstorming process.

Oh, you know what? I almost forgot. Are you ready for a bonus? Let’s talk about pillar 4. The very last step after the other pillars is to present your ideas in a way that enables your team to start creating stellar content right away. Once you have your central ideas down, it’s essential to deliver them effectively so your expectations can be met.

Well, that about does it. Hopefully, you enjoyed this post. I believe that you’re well on your way to creating stellar blog posts. Stay tuned for more from our team. In the meantime, please leave a comment below. Or, you can even share this on your social media accounts.