Having a blog can sound like a really scary thing. The most frequent question about blogging is how and where to find blog ideas. It is easy in the beginning, but once we start writing frequently (Webinuse is being updated almost every day) we can face creative blockage.
Today we are going to talk about the 5 best ways to get blog ideas, for technical blogs.
1. Everyday life
The easiest way to find a blog idea is through everyday life. E.g. we work on an application and we face a problem. After several hours of research, we finally succeed in solving it. The best way to prevent that problem from ever happening again is to write it down. And if we can help someone else in the process, that is even better.
Also, another way to find new blog ideas is by going through social media and checking what others are struggling with, or what others are sharing. This way is, probably, even better because we will have immediate attention once we share our article.
Actually, anything we do during the day can be an excellent source of blog ideas, from social media, videos, work, friends, etc.
2. Google Trends
Most of us when starting out we try to find how to be on the first page on Google. And a lot of articles talk about Google Trends as a way of finding the right keyword. Google Trends are a super useful tool, but to use Google Trends we already need to know our article topic. Or at least we need to know the broader topic.
Let’s take an example that we are having a blog for web developers like webinuse.com. And we want to write an article but we have no idea where to start. So, we go on social media and see a couple of posts about CSS. And we know that we would be able to write some article on CSS, but what?! That is when Google Trends come in handy.
We should open https://trends.google.com, and enter CSS in search and select a search term (CSS in this case), like on the image below.
After we chose a search term we will be redirected to another page, where we can see all the information on that search term, usually for our country. We can change that to “Worldwide”, if applicable, to get a little better understanding of what people are searching for.
We can also compare two terms. But a real gem for blog ideas is on the bottom of the page, called “Related Queries”. Here, we can check out what people have been searching for that is similar to our term.
The only problem with Google Trends is that we do not see exact numbers, but rather a ratio between 0 and 100, where 0 is the lowest number of searches and 100 the highest. That’s where the third way kicks in.
3. ahrefs keyword generator
ahrefs keyword generator is the tool for generating blog ideas. Once we find a relevant query or keyword that is trending, on Google Trends, we take that and paste it into ahrefs’ tool.
We can either choose “Phrase match” or “Questions” and we will see the keyword difficulty, volume, and last updated date. These three pieces of information are more than enough to find our keywords and blog ideas.
4. StackOverflow
Yeah, this one was, probably, unexpected. We need to leverage any tool we can get our hands-on. StackOverflow is the most popular platform among developers for coding problems. It is highly unlikely that we have some problem that nobody before us had. If someone already had that problem 90% that it is already answered on StackOverflow.
How can we leverage StackOverflow?
- We head to https://stackoverflow.com/tags
- We pick a tag that we are familiar with, enough to write an article
- Than we click on that tag and choose filter
- Usually we should pick “Most Frequent” or “Most Votes” and we will see the list of questions.
- Then we just pick
5. Competition blog ideas
We should always check what our competition does at the moment. What are they writing about and what is their focus. For example, it is an excellent time to start writing about Web3, especially about Blockchain, how to start, where to start, what courses to watch, and similar things.
But, we should be careful. If we are using someone else’s work we MUST link to their content, and state that it is their work. If we want to just have inspiration then we should use multiple sources. Why? Because we could make more complete and broader articles than our competition, which would help our SEO a lot. And if we are looking at multiple sources, there is a higher chance that we will see more things, than we, alone, could think of.
If you have any questions or anything you can find me on my Twitter, or you can read some of my other articles like Embed assets in a WordPress theme.