Shweiki teams up with Gini Dietrich, founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, to present the first installment of a five-part video series on how one can get blog posts read and shared. Here, in the first part of the series, she discusses how to generate and capture blog post ideas.
Five Series Agenda:
- Generate and capture blog post ideas
- Tricks to write popular blog posts
- Get people to share blog posts
- Content hubs
- Content distribution
How to Generate Blog Post Ideas
1. Use alerts, such as Google Alert, Talkwalker and SmartBrief
Alerts are daily email notifications about different topics that a person can opt to receive. For example, if a person wanted to stay current on the topic “content marketing,” one could simply type “content marketing” + trends into the alerts search box to receive daily emails containing information and trends regarding content marketing. Now, that person has the ability to generate blog post ideas just by checking his or her email once a day.
2. Read the comments
Most advice says to never look at the comments, and most of the time that rings true. However, blogs about a specific industry or topic like marketing content normally have civil and professional comments that can be very helpful and informative. Therefore, it is important for a blogger to look at the comments on his or her own page and the comments on influencer blogs. Commenters can ask great questions and have great ideas that can be used by bloggers to create new blog content
3. Pay attention to current events
This is probably the most obvious way to generate blog topics. One should pay attention to things happening in the world that day or week, and capitalize on the fact that people are searching and seeking out more information about these topics.
4. Check Sent Mail
One should check their sent mail often because they’re often already answering questions and writing content every single day without realizing it.
It’s important to remember that one can generate blog post ideas anywhere. The next step is capturing those ideas.
How to Capture Blog Post Ideas
After generating an idea, one can capture them in the following ways:
- Using notebooks
- Utilizing Google documents
- Creating an Editorial calendar
- Typing the idea as a headline in WordPress
- Using the Notes app in iPhone
- Emailing oneself ideas
- Keeping a running Word document where all ideas are dumped into
The point here is that there is not a one-size-fits-all method for capturing ideas; on should decide what method(s) of recording concepts works best for them. The key is making sure that good blog topics don’t get forgotten or overlooked.
TWEETABLE FACTS: