Every writer will encounter writer’s block at some point in their life; inevitably, you will occasionally feel uninspired when writing Blog Posts.
What should you do when you reach that point? How do you get over that hump and find inspiration for your blog posts? If you are a blogger, it can sometimes be even harder to find inspiration. These tips from Seattle Digital Marketing can help you find inspiration to write interesting and unique content for your blog
The Audience
Blogs often have a comment section and you may have feedback from your audience in those comments. Sometimes it is just a positive note of how much they enjoyed your post, but you may receive questions in those comments. While some of those questions can be quickly answered in a sentence or two, some really need to be elaborated on, giving you the perfect starting point for a blog post, which you can then send the commenter once it is published to answer their question thoroughly.
You can keep a list of these types of questions to go through when you are struggling to find something to write about.
Keyword Research
Your site should have conducted keyword research, which means there should be a document available with keywords and phrases your site wants to rank for. While the keyword itself is not a topic, it is a good jumping-off point; long-tail keywords are especially valuable in this case.
You can type a keyword into Google and see what pops up, which can help inspire you. The results show how your competition is covering these keywords, which can inspire you to find a topic you can cover better than they did.
Google Search Console
The Google Search Console has more to offer you than just allowing you to crawl errors. The performance report it gives you includes the search queries that bring people to your site, and you may find queries you never thought about writing about before.
Other Blogs
One great way to come up with inspiration is to find blogs that have similar topics to yours and just scroll through their posts to see what interesting things they have covered that might be good for your audience. Let’s say you are writing a digital marketing blog and you are in a small town near Seattle; you may want to look up some blogs that are in the Seattle area to give you a good idea of what is relevant to your audience.
When looking at these blogs, make sure you take a look at the comments sections to help you find future inspiration as well.
Current Events
What is going on in the world right now that is relevant to your audience? Keep an eye on news sites for when they publish something relevant to your audience. Some sites will even let you set up alerts for specific topics, so you will know automatically if they publish something new.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a good example of publishing current events that impact your niche. A food blogger could provide recipes for healthy cooking at home. A parenting blog can cover the ways the pandemic is affecting children and tips for how to make things as comfortable as possible at home.
Keep a List
You will probably have days where there are tons of blog ideas in your head and you do not know which ones to write about now. Writing down all of those ideas when they occur can make finding something to write about on days when you are lacking inspiration much easier. Whenever you have a good idea, write it down for later.
Your Daily Life
Sometimes, it is easiest to simply write what you know. Depending on your niche, you may be able to write about something that happened at work or home today or talk about a specific problem going on in your life. This can be tricky, but if it fits in with your niche, it can be a big help.
Make sure you respect the privacy of whomever you are writing about and ask for permission before using someone as an example in your post. For instance, if you were writing a parenting blog and your friend’s child did something outrageous that you want to write about, ask them first and make sure to protect their privacy in your post as well.
Content Idea Generator
This is not going to give you completely perfect article ideas, but the Content Idea Generator can help give you a good direction to take, or if nothing else, a few laughs. For example, I entered “SEO” into the generator, and one of the titles it gave me was “The Hunger Games Guide to SEO.” While it is not a usable title, it is amusing. A more helpful title it provided was “The Insider’s Guide to SEO.” While this suggestion is still pretty vague, if you drop it into Google, you should find plenty of content using that phrase, leading you to inspiration.
Social Media
Facebook is filled with groups covering different topics, including groups for bloggers. In these, can discuss ideas with other bloggers and get inspiration sometimes when you really need it. There are also most likely groups specific to your niche that you can join and draw inspiration from.
You may not have thought about using Pinterest in this way before, but it can be a great source of inspiration for you. Search Pinterest for blog ideas, what to write about, and blog post ideas, attaching your niche to the query. This can bring up some great ideas for what to write about but be careful not to lose track of time searching around Pinterest; it can be easy to lose focus and spend hours looking at things on Pinterest.
Take a Break
Sometimes your writer’s block is because you have spent too much time sitting in front of your computer screen and you simply need a break. Get some fresh air, take a walk, meditate, work out, walk your dog — whatever is best to help you clear your head. Getting away from the computer for a little while and clearing your head is sometimes all you need to get inspired.
Conclusion
Your niche will determine which of these tips will be most helpful to your blogging. If you need help with the blog on your site, contact Seattle Digital Marketing today to get started!
