This article is a chapter from my book Blog Ideas: 131 Ideas to Kill Writer's Block, Supercharge Your Blog and Stand Out. The entire book will eventually be available on this website for free in web format, but if you prefer to read it in ebook or physical formats, you can find Blog Ideas on Amazon.com (affiliate link).
This article can’t provide an exhaustive list of every idea you can have. The best ideas are the ones not thought of yet.
You can borrow any idea out of this article without any modification. But I do hope that the ideas you find here act as a springboard for you to come up with even better ideas. As technology continues to change with the times, blog ideas will also change. Most of the content in this article will someday become outdated. But this blog post is evergreen.
This blog post will give you ideas for coming up with ideas. You don’t have to be a genius or a Bohemian artist to come up with good ideas. There are techniques for coming up with ideas that anyone can learn.
The first set of techniques will help get your brain in good shape for coming up with ideas. Your brain is like a muscle. It can tire out in exhaustion after a hard day of work. It can also atrophy when you don’t use it enough. Use the exercises in this section to keep your brain in top shape.
The second group of techniques will help you find inspiration. Inspiration doesn’t come from luck. You need to go out and find it. Inspiration comes from exposing yourself to new things and new information. This section will give you some ideas for where you can seek out inspiration.
The last set of techniques will teach you different ways to brainstorm ideas. Even with a healthy brain and inspiration, you won’t get new ideas if you don’t give yourself time to think. Brainstorming techniques are ways you can set aside time for coming up with ideas.
Supercharging your brain
If your brain is fatigued, it won’t do you well for coming up with ideas. If you don’t exercise it, it will be weak.
To be creative, you need to keep yourself healthy. It’s hard to think when you’re in pain. It’s also hard to think when you’re sick, sluggish, and worried about things. It’s only when you are free from worries, pain, and distractions that you can unleash the full power of your creativity.
Even being healthy is not enough if you don’t actually use your brain. Like any other skill, creativity requires practice to master. If you practice creativity regularly, you will be able to harness it when you need it. Here are some things you can do to keep your brain in top shape.
Capture your ideas
Carry a pen and paper or smartphone with you everywhere you go. You need to have something to jot notes down with you at all times because you never know when you’ll have a great idea. It can be as simple as a piece of paper and pencil in your pocket. Or it can be as sophisticated as a special app on your smartphone.
I like to carry my smartphone with me everywhere I go. I use Google Keep to take notes when ideas strike. Another popular choice is Evernote. While these two choices are special apps you can install, the notes app that comes standard with all smartphones will work as well.
Once you have a habit of taking notes on all your ideas, you also need to build a habit of reviewing your notes. What I do is go through my notes once a day. I would consider each note and decide what to do with it. I might paste it into a reference file, or a future projects list, or act on it immediately. Or if I decide that the note no longer has value, I would delete it. Once I’ve processed all my notes, I delete the note so I can start fresh the next day. Schedule a time each day to review your notes and take action on them.
Exercise
Exercise gets the blood flowing to your brain, which in turn helps boost creativity. For you to think to your full potential, you need to have a healthy body. A diseased body distracts the mind. Self-preservation takes priority over creativity. The less healthy you are, the more resources your brain diverts away from creative pursuits to sustain your life. It is hard to think when you are in pain. Your mind becomes sluggish when you are overweight.
To have a creative mind, you need to make daily exercise a priority. Schedule exercise as early as possible in your day. Then you have the rest of the day to pursue your creativity.
As a creative blogger, you might not have the motivation to spend hours at the gym. There are other ways of staying in shape that are better suited for the blogger lifestyle.
Walking is the exercise of choice for many writers. It lets you take a break from your writing to move your body, while at the same time giving you time to think. Pick a time to go on a daily walk. Make sure you bring a notepad or dictation device to record all the ideas you will inevitably have while walking.
If walking is too sedentary for you, try developing a jogging habit. Jogging is best done early in the morning right after you wake. It’s a great way to start a day. Listen to music, podcasts, or audio books while you jog for some motivation and inspiration.
For some people, going outside is not practical. When you need to exercise indoors, try doing desk exercises or bodyweight exercises. They are exercises you can do in a small space with no equipment like push-ups, sit-ups, calisthenics, squats, stretching or deep breathing.
Bloggers should pay particular attention to exercises for the lower back, posture, and wrists. The best exercises for the lower back are Superman, Cat Stretch, and Bridge. The best exercises for posture include Plank, Side Bends, and Shoulder Rolls. Google them or search for them on YouTube if you don’t know what they are. Wrist exercises are difficult to explain. Search for them on YouTube to get an idea for how to stretch out your wrists to avoid common computer-induced wrist injuries.
If you write using a Pomodoro Technique timer, you can use your short breaks for exercise. Make a plan for when you will exercise and add it to your calendar. Treat exercise as the same priority level as you treat sleeping and writing. They are all equally important to your blog!
Sleep
Sleep is just as important to your creativity as exercise. As you sleep, your brain collects its thoughts and clears away the toxins that built up during your waking hours. Your subconscious pieces together all the random bits of information, and tries to make sense of it.
Sometimes sleeping can help you get new ideas. You can use this to your advantage. Often, your brain works hardest on whatever you were thinking about before bed. Try thinking about your blog before falling asleep. You may wake up with some new ideas.
Change your environment
It’s hard to come up with new ideas when you’re looking at the same things all the time. Take a walk outside. Go somewhere you’ve never been before. Go to another room and sit on the floor for a while. Chances are, you will notice some things you’ve never noticed before. Noticing new things can help you think of new ideas.
Meditate
In a lot of ways, meditation is similar to sleep. You are taking control away from your conscious mind and letting go. If you have dozens of thoughts going through your head, it is hard to come up with new ideas. Meditation helps clear your thoughts to make room for new ones.
Meditation is easy and can be done in just a few minutes. Find a quiet spot and sit. Close your eyes. Breathe slowly and deeply while clearing your mind of thoughts. Concentrate on your breath. Whenever a thought enters your mind, imagine yourself grabbing that thought and blowing it away. Once your mind is clear and you are calm, you will be ready to work again with a fresh mind.
Finding inspiration
Ever notice how you get the best ideas in the shower or while you’re reading? When your brain is at rest, it puts things together. It makes sense of things and creates new ideas. To make sure this works best, you need to put good content in your brain for it to work on in the subconscious.
There is a saying in computer science that goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” If you put garbage information into a computer, you can only get garbage information out of it. The same applies to your brain, the most powerful computer of all. If you put bad information into your brain, you will always come to the wrong conclusions. And the opposite is also true. If you fill your brain with good information, you will come up with great ideas.
Do internet research
Next time you’re surfing the web, instead of typing “funny cats” in the search box, try searching keywords related to your blog content. Hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of new content are uploaded to the internet each day. Search some keywords from your area of interest and let yourself get inspired by the content others have already created.
Steal ideas from other blogs you read. I don’t mean that in a malicious way. Copying content is a punishable offense, but copying ideas is okay. People get ideas all the time, but few implement them. If you see something that seems to be working on someone else’s blog, try it on your own blog.
Ask Amazon
Amazon (www.amazon.com) has a useful suggestion feature when you type in their search box. Type your topic into the Amazon search bar, and you will see the most popular searches beginning with the words you typed. If you run the search, you will then see what books have been written about the topic. This is all good information for knowing what kinds of information people are looking for.
Look at the trends
Some ideas pop into your head when you get new information. Sometimes, you will get new ideas by following the news and spotting trends. With the internet, it’s easier than ever.
The best way to keep up with the news is to read it from a news aggregator. You don’t have to spend an hour every day visiting several news sites. News aggregators take news from several sources and compile it into one page.
News aggregators:
Your niche likely has its own dedicated news sites. If you’re having a tough time coming up with blog post ideas, try writing about the latest article you read. Finding trends by reading news requires you to be good at recognizing patterns. You also need to make a habit of scanning through dozens of news articles each day. There is a shortcut. Most social media sites and search engines can spot trends for you. There are also websites dedicated to spotting and reporting trends.
Trend sites:
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter also show trending topics on their sidebars.
If you have the time and patience, you can also collect your own trends data. Gather data by doing keyword searches, analyzing discussion forums, or surveying your readers. By collecting data, you will soon see patterns and trends that others may have missed. Putting in the extra work may enable you to identify unique topics and report on them before anyone else.
Read
Prolific writers tend to read a lot. Stephen King reads seventy or eighty books a year, and he claims he’s a slow reader. Reading is how people like Stephen King come up with so many ideas for their books. You should be spending at least as much time reading as you are writing. Reading is the input, and writing is the output. If you read too little, it will result in poor quality writing output.
Learn more about related topics
Knowledge is like a tree. It branches out into different disciplines. The disciplines branch out further into topics. Topics stem into niches. The niches spread further into leaves of information. And the tree is always growing and changing.
Once you’ve exhausted ideas from your topic, look at the branches off to the sides. Find the related issues. How can your blog’s readers learn from similar but different fields? If your blog is about automotive repair, what can your readers learn from a car salesperson? It might surprise you how adjacent fields view your niche.
Go on a field trip
Sometimes to find inspiration, you must step outside and explore something new. Take a field trip. You don’t have to go to a museum or somewhere new, though you can if you like. Even a trip to the local library or a walk around the mall can spark new ideas. Browse the magazines at the bookstore or library. Take a walk in the local park. Spend the afternoon at an art gallery. Inspiration often hits when you stop thinking so hard and take in new sights.
Brainstorming techniques
Brainstorming is the actual act of coming up with ideas. It is not keeping your brain sharp or a stroke of inspiration. You make a decision to come up with ideas at a particular time, then you sit down and try your hardest to come up with them.
There are many ways you can go through a brainstorming session. It can be a wild freethinking session of writing whatever comes to your head. Or it can be a structured collaborative effort between members of a team. There are benefits to both extremes.
The first rule of brainstorming is there are no bad ideas. Every idea that comes to mind should be considered, no matter how silly it seems at the outset. The point of brainstorming is not to find polished ideas, but to think out loud and work out solutions that may actually be good. Many million-dollar products have started out as ridiculous ideas taken too far.
Follow the Daily Practice
Writer and entrepreneur James Altucher always encourages people to follow the Daily Practice. The Daily Practice is coming up with ten ideas a day to keep your “idea muscle” strong. If you think of 10 ideas a day, that’s 3,650 ideas a year. Following this simple practice, you will have thousands of new ideas in a matter of months. And you’ll also have a strong idea muscle.
Group brainstorming
When you have a team working on a project, it is important to get feedback from each member. The simplest way to do a group brainstorming session is to have a meeting in person. One person will be the note taker, who will record every idea. Everyone then throws out any idea that comes to mind. Nobody is allowed to criticize any idea.
If the members of the group are more comfortable expressing ideas in writing, you can try this. Have everyone spend a few minutes writing down ideas. When the time is up, everyone trades sheets of paper and expands on those thoughts.
After the brainstorming session is complete, everyone can discuss which ideas are best. You can do further brainstorming sessions to develop the best ideas more.
Draw a mind map
A mind map is a diagram that organizes thoughts. You start out with a central concept and write that in the middle. Then you expand upon the central concept, drawing lines out of it for each new thought. For every thought you have, write down a description, keywords, or the name of the concept.
For thinking of new blog or article ideas, begin with your general topic in the middle. Then whatever ideas come to your head, write it down and draw a line out from where it came. In the end, the mind map should look like an octopus with idea-tentacles branching outward.
You can create mind maps with paper or a whiteboard. If you prefer, there are also many software solutions out there. Some popular ones you can use for free are Coggle, XMind, and FreeMind.
Explore another medium
There are advantages and disadvantages to each type of media. A blog post is well suited for delivering scannable text content to web browsers. Other types of media include e-books, audio books, online courses, slide presentations, and videos. Think about what other types of media you would like to try. How can you adapt content from your blog to other media? Or you can think of the reverse. How can you adapt other types of media content into blog posts?
Explore new technology
Imagine how different your online presence might be today if you were one of the first users of Facebook? What if you were the first to curate your blog posts into an e-book on Amazon Kindle? How would things be different if you started sending videos from your iPhone to your blog years ago?
Always be on the lookout for new platforms, new types of media, and new technology. Try new things. Think about how you can integrate new things into your blogging experience.
Make a lotus blossom
The Lotus Blossom technique was developed by Yasuo Matsumura. You start out with a central idea written in a square. There are eight boxes surrounding the central idea square. In each of the eight surrounding boxes, you write a related idea. Draw a bigger box next to each of the eight surrounding boxes. In each of the bigger boxes, flesh out the related ideas.
This technique works well for coming up with a series of blog posts. The first article in the series will introduce the central concept. Then you can write the next articles in the series about the related topics.
PSFBB
PSFB is a brainstorming technique developed by an Australian company called Brain Mates. It was further adapted by the Web Marketing Ninja in The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing to include another B, for Barrier. PSFBB stands for Problem, Solution, Feature, Barrier, Benefits. You can use this technique to find ideas for what articles your readers need.
Start by listing problems your readers might have. For each problem, list a few possible solutions. For each solution, write a few features that will help you reach the solution. Features are the prerequisites for reaching the solution. They might include expert advice, people to talk to, instructions, services, or websites to visit. For each feature, write down barriers preventing people from getting the feature, or questions people may have about the feature. Finally, for each barrier, list the benefits of overcoming the barrier.
Now you should have a list of problems that branch out into many barriers. From here, you can write blog articles about how to overcome each of the barriers to solving each problem your readers have.
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