How To Generate Blog Post Ideas For Your Content Marketing Strategy

The business of content marketing is the business of ideas. Blog post ideas, newsletter ideas, ideas for courses or whitepapers – we need them all.

And we need a lot of them!

Here are 100+ blog post ideas, compiled over the last year, to get your creative juices flowing…

1. Play into an audience fear

Ask a question of your reader that underscores one of their greatest fears, and then allay that fear within the blog by offering the solution.

From a neurological perspective, negative words in headlines lead to more clicks, according to Neuroscience and SEO expert Giulia Panozzo, but very careful to avoid clickbait.

2. Offer a hypothetical or write a ”What if” post

Comment on the wider industry with a op-ed / think-piece, like this one “What if there were no Google?”, or inspire readers with novel possibilities.

3. Create tool battle cards with “vs.” posts

Compare your product or service against competitors.

This defensive content strategy will allow you to say your piece against your top rivals, and highlight your USPs.

4. Compare two competitors and insert your brand into the conversation

This is a great tip from content expert Chima Mmeje.

Rather than trash talking competitors, focus on capturing the branded traffic of two of your competitors, by comparing their relative merits and disadvantages.

Then bring the conversation back to your own brand, and sell your offering in the conclusion.

Chima gives this blog on HelloSign vs. Docusign, by Pandadoc, as a brilliant example of this.

But you can also do this for brands you have some affiliation with.

For example, Zapier writes about the tools that it integrates with, as a vehicle for promoting its own services. 

5. Put forward a provocative opinion or challenge a common belief

Another blog post idea that creates clicks is the “Controversial opinion”. Going against the grain is a great way to entice audiences to read on.

In the example from SparkToro below, Rand Fishkin challenges the whole notion of marketing attribution; a practice that many marketers swear-by for measuring success.

This headline makes readers want to click to find out exactly “How” they can report on success without attribution.

6. Showcase “A day in the life”

Put someone in the hot seat.

Interview them on what a typical day looks like in their role. It could be an industry professional, a thought leader, a celeb – even you.

7. Create a stat-driven case study

Impressive stats pique our interest. Create a case study that makes readers want to click, with a stat that packs a punch.

We did just this in our Rise at Seven case study.

And for extra inspiration, read this awesome piece by Ryan Darani.

8. Curate your case studies

From an SEO perspective, this blog post idea is on-point. Often case study landing pages lack the right amount of detail to rank for competitive keywords.

Curating a list of your best case studies in blog form can help you not only promote your product / service, but also reach the heady heights of page one in the SERPs.

This is a great example from Fractl, which is helping them to rank in position #1 (at the time of writing) for the keyword “content marketing case studies” which gets searched 700 times /month globally.

9. Curate first and third party statistics

According to our study of three million B2B content marketing examples, statistics posts are most likely to drive big links, and this blog from Ahrefs is no exception.

Many blog post idea articles suggest creating statistics blogs, but we suggest curating both externally AND internally so that your blog post acts as an internal link repository.

10. Link two seemingly unrelated concepts

Draw comparisons between your topic and an unassociated, novel, or taboo topic.

This is another great click-driving technique.

Audiences will be desperate to know how these two seemingly unrelated topics are connected.

Use headline phrases like “What X taught me about Y” or “How X made me a better Y”.

11. Create first-party original research

This is a heavier-lift blog post idea, but a proven way to drive shares, links, and traffic.

ChatGPT has democratized the creation of content and made it easy for anyone to blog, but there’s still no real replacement for first-hand, original research.

That’s because you’re creating unique theories and hypotheses with data.

At BuzzSumo, we specialize in original research, and work on multiple studies a year, including this analysis of 600K journalists.

12. Create useful Google Sheets formulas

Do you have a nifty process in Google Sheets or excel that might be handy for your audience to know?

Write a blog post outlining your Sheet hacks, and embed your template for your audience to use.

This kind of blog idea has become increasingly popular recently, especially in PR and Marketing.

In fact we worked with Digital PR, Tom Chivers, on a webinar to showcase the best PR formulas for outreach using BuzzSumo.

13. Create an ultimate guide

Everyone has heard of the ultimate guide. Take a subject you’re well-versed in and go to town explaining it.

Include commonly asked / searched FAQs, definitions that give you more chance of visibility in the SERPs, and tutorial-like step-by-steps complete with examples.  

14. Curate expert opinions and guidance

Expert compilations have been a hit for a while, but some rely heavily on the contributors’ audiences to make them work.

We recommend adding value to expert input, rather than relying on it.

What’s good about Aira’s yearly contributor reports is that they’re a mix of real research, analysis, and expert opinions.

This means that the influencer’s point of view adds to the content, rather than being the sole focus.

15. Write an open letter

Open letters usually take the recipient to task on a specific issue.

The public nature of an open letter attracts attention in the same way a school tussle draws a crowd.

Use this type of blog post only if you have something worth saying.

And be mindful that this kind of content can divide opinion.

16. Carry out an experiment and report on the outcome

Conducting an experiment, and taking your reader along for the ride, is a great way to build loyal audiences.

Complete with scene-setting, a hypothesis, methodology, and first and third-person chronological accounts, this experiment by Reboot Online does just that.

17. Repurpose social media content

Whether it’s a Twitter thread or LinkedIn discussion, use social media activity as inspiration for your next blog post idea.

The PR Measurement guide below was written by Digital PR Expert Stephen Waddington, and began life as a Twitter discussion.

The chat piqued our interest at BuzzSumo HQ, and so we reached out to Stephen and asked him if he’d be interested in guest posting his ideas on our blog.

18. Spotlight a feature in your product

Highlight a new feature, including its benefits and use cases, to help your users get going.

19. Draw up actionable tips

Focus on sharing genuinely useful tips that your audience can actually act upon.

Too many blogs are filled with fluff, and nebulous advice.

Give your reader some incredibly specific tips that they can’t help but test-drive.

This blog post idea is also a great way to drive traffic to your site since “Topic + tip” keyword combinations are usually popular searches.

Take this list from Ahrefs.

Not only does it perfectly combine tactical tips with sage strategic advice, it also ranks in position two for the keyword “Marketing tips”, which drives a cool 6.3K searches a month globally.

And to date it has driven hundreds of engagements online…

How to verify whether your blog post ideas are worth creating

Now you’ve seen some blog post idea examples, it’s time to work out how to qualify your ideas.

Are the worth the engagement effort? Let’s find out…

In most cases the general focus of your content will be set by business purpose. Business blogs must focus on topics that support the product offering.

To support the business with a profitable blog, content creators take a static subject area and write about it over and over again in (hopefully!) fresh and engaging ways. It’s a bit like rotating a gemstone and describing how the light bounces off different facets.

As content areas become saturated, and competition for attention increases, it’s more important than ever to find relevant topics closely related to your main subject area.

In this section, we’ll look at how data can augment our creativity and help us discover endless blog post ideas.

Here’s what we’ll be covering:

• A data driven approach to blog post ideas
• Data can augment and simplify our blog post idea generation
• Use related topics to find great blog post ideas in less time
• Blog post ideas for saturated content areas
• Qualify related topics
• Expand your audience with related blog post topics
• How to position multiple ideas

A data-driven approach to blog post ideas

At times, usually early in the life of a blog, it’s easier to come up with blog post ideas using creativity, intuition, and industry knowledge.

It’s the honeymoon phase of blogging! We should enjoy it (Also, make a scrapbook – we’ll need some of that inspiration later!)

But at some point we’ll run out of ideas, or we’ll be asked to justify the ideas we do have.

Customer interactions are a huge help at this point. Ask your customer success team what they think your customers are interested in.

To make that input practical, try the 10×10 exercise recommended by Stephanie Liu from Lights, Camera Live:.

1. Take a sheet of paper and fold it in half.
2. On one side write the 10 most frequently asked questions about your product or service.
3. On the other, write the 10 questions people should be asking about your product or service but aren’t.
4. Now, you have a list of at least 15 – 20 things to blog about.

Data can augment and simplify our blog post idea generation

Google Analytics or other tools track site visits, and social signals help gauge audience interest, so we can iterate on our current blog post ideas.

To track site visits to a particular blog post, you’ll need the Behavior section of Google Analytics.

Apply a filter to limit the results to only your blog pages.

This data will show you which of your posts draw the most visitors. And, the Average Session Duration will tell you if they stuck around long enough to really engage with the content.

Social engagements help us to see what audiences are interested in.

For example, some of our most shared posts at BuzzSumo are lengthy guides.

Social engagement is a great proxy for audience interest. When we know that content about one facet of our product is grabbing social attention, we can increase our connection with our audiences by leveraging that topic.

In addition to looking at analytics and social shares, it’s also critical to drill down into industry sources– reading, researching, and documenting trends as we go.

To truly benefit from this approach, consistency and commitment are required.

Ann Handley, author, speaker, and Chief Content Officer at Marketing Profs, recommends collecting and recording five writing ideas each day.

Here are a couple of sources to get you started:

• Amazon’s book previews: Look at chapter titles
• Google Trends: Use the explore option for your subject area
• Hashtagify.me: Look for variations of your topic areas in hashtag form
• Conference agendas: Look at the titles of keynote speeches and workshops
• Google’s “searches related to”: Located at the bottom of each search page

• Pinterest’s auto suggest: Look at the topics suggested at the top of search results

Finding and qualifying blog post ideas is time-consuming, especially if you write many posts a day or work for multiple clients.

Use related topics to find great blog post ideas in less time

The BuzzSumo Topic Explorer is one way to save time. It suggests related topics, popular content, AND a key question for any subject you write about.

The Topic Explorer adds a layer of artificial intelligence to our platform, allowing content creators to expand their reach (and their blog post ideas) to new subject areas.

Find out more about The Topic Explorer

The Topic Explorer’s question suggestion is curated based on relevance. Each related topic includes additional subtopics to explore.

Once you know your audience’s preferred content formats, it’s easy to combine them with related topics to generate new blog post ideas.

For example, our audience likes original research and “How to” posts.

And, for our main topic area, “content marketing,” The Topic Explorer recommends the following related topics.

The table below shows how I might combine the two to come up with blog post ideas.

Another approach would be to look at individual questions in the related topics and work through them, adding How, Why, or List posts formats to create working titles. Infographics are also a great way to answer questions!

Try The Topic Explorer

Any source of related topics can be put through this grid to spur creativity!

If you have ideas from conference agendas, or from Google related searches, or from Pinterest auto-suggest, add them to your grid for even more blog post ideas.

Blog post ideas for saturated content areas

When faced with a saturated or overly competitive topic area, what do you do?

More ideas for the same saturated topic won’t necessarily help grab attention if there are already hundreds of thousands of published posts.

There are two mental models we find helpful to expand topics for saturated content areas.

Hierarchical expansion begins with a broad topic and looks to more and more specific themes. Andy Crestodina described this concept as “niching down.”

For example, if social media marketing is the topic I write about, and it’s saturated with content, I may want to consider narrowing my focus:

• Facebook marketing
• Facebook Live
• Facebook Advertising
• AB testing
• Facebook ads
• Average Facebook ad spend for an SMB
• Saving money on
• Facebook ads as an SMB
• Which type of ad goal is the best value for an SMB
• Creating an a lead gen ad for an SMB
• Content marketing

Lateral expansion looks at ideas that are related to each other at a similar level of specificity. The litmus test for lateral expansion might be this:

People interested in X are also often interested in Y.

In the example above, Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing would be examples of lateral ideas. It passes the litmus test, “People interested in social media marketing are also often interested in content marketing.”

Of course, these two models are a little arbitrary! (Taxonomies are tough in every field of study.)

Laterally related topics can also be expressed as part of a hierarchy. They would simply be listed with the same level of importance.

And, specific areas of interest in a hierarchy are only “niche” in the sense that they can be considered a subset of a larger topic area. Niche areas will often have their own experts, big ideas, and areas of ongoing controversy or study.

However, the concepts of lateral and hierarchical expansion are useful for developing blog post ideas, especially if our main topic area is heavily competitive or already saturated with great content.

The Topic Explorer offers a quick look at lateral (top line) and hierarchically (related keywords) related ideas.

For each laterally related topic, there are more specific, niche keyword suggestions.

And, additional Topic Explorer searches can produce even more related and specific inspiration.

Qualify related topics

Once you have created a massive file of blog post ideas, how do you decide what to write about?

At its simplest, qualifying a topic is binary:

Something is either a good idea or a bad idea.

But, if you have ever tried to convince your team of either, you know that you’ll need more than a hunch to persuade your boss, client, or colleague.

Qualifying topics is done in two phases – before you publish, and after you publish. In both phases data analysis can help guide the process.

Customer questions, customer surveys, social engagement with existing content, web traffic data, industry trends and thought-leader input all help us to select the best blog topics.

If you have a file of customer questions or survey responses try running them through a text analyzer to see which themes emerge. (Thanks to Gini Dietrich who suggested this approach for developing courses.) You can do the same thing with conference agendas, etc.

For example, here is a wordcloud of topics from the 2019 Social Media Marketing World agenda, created at jasondavies.com/wordcloud (I removed the word marketing).

I also did simple text analysis to find the words used most in the presentation descriptions:

1. Facebook
2. Content
3. Video
4. Sales
5. Business
6. Live
7. Instagram
8. Build
9. Grow
10. Linkedin

With this analysis, I can see what industry leaders are thinking about and use these hot topics to validate blog post ideas.

For example ‘Facebook Live’, ‘YouTube content’, or ‘use of bots in marketing’ all seem like good blog post ideas.

BuzzSumo’s Content and Topic Ideas Generator offers:

• Keyword search volume
• Social engagement data
• Trending stories
• Forum questions

In a single snapshot, helping you to make quick, data-informed content decisions and further validate your blog post ideas.

BuzzSumo also leverages machine learning to suggest topics that creators can rely on, without needing to spend time analyzing line after line of information.

Popular posts are those with the most relevance and engagement.

If you navigate to the Content Analyzer, you will see the most evergreen topics, or sort to see the topics with the most engagements by network.

Expand your audience with related blog post topics

Fundamentally, content marketing is a quest for site traffic.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to get more people to visit websites.

One way to do this is to appeal to a wider audience.

If your traffic drops off, writing about a closely related idea may expand your reach to more users.

The example comparison below shows far less competition and more average social engagement for the topic “employee engagement” compared to “human resources”.

If my human resources site isn’t gaining traffic, employee engagement might be a good expansion topic.

How to position multiple ideas

With endless blog post ideas in mind, we’ll need to think about how we use blog content to increase – rather than dilute – the impact of our site. We will also need to design a logical path for users through our content.

Lee Odden, co-founder and CEO of TopRank Marketing, recommends a hub and spoke model or a power page approach.

Hub and spoke

In a hub and spoke model, tiers of supporting and related content connect to each other and drive readers toward the hub or central content piece.

Consider creating a best answer post as the centerpiece for this strategy.

Here’s an example for accounting software:

Use The Topic Explorer to choose the best spoke content and be sure you’ve covered every facet by looking at the suggested questions and asking if a customer would find a satisfactory answer on your site.

Power pages are based on a similar concept, but they place the supporting materials, primary topic and related resources all on the same page.

Lee illustrates the concept this way:

Whichever layout you choose, a blog idea file filled with related topics is a must to drive business goals.

Coming up with new blog post and content ideas is the bane of a content creators existence at the start of every new quarter, but remember that data and tools can do a lot of the heavy-lifting for you. If you want to tap into oven baked content ideas, BuzzSumo is here for you – try our 30 day free trial for access to the Topic Explorer, Content Analyzer and other powerful content generating tools.