Do you find it challenging to come up with great guest and blog post ideas?
For many bloggers and content marketers, this is the case.
If they don’t get good ideas they won’t create good — or any — content.
They’ll usually procrastinate and postpone writing their blog posts because they don’t know how to start and what would make for a good blog post.
And if they don’t create, then they won’t be able to get the results with their blogging.
But in order to be successful online with blogging and guest posting, you need to be consistent. So if you’re not regularly publishing content, then it’ll be challenging to gain any sort of momentum and build an audience.
If you’re still finding it challenging to come up with good blog and guest post ideas, then it’s time to try something different.
You can use the following 6 tools to generate an unlimited amount ideas for your blog and guest posts.
1. Quora
Using Quora — a site that aggregates questions and answers to topics — is great way to get a lot of ideas for your content. By searching the Quora database for your topic, it’ll give you the top questions people have about that topic, as well as answers from experts.
In order to use Quora, you’ll need to signup or login with one of your social media accounts.
Once you’re in, to find a good blog or guest post idea simply enter your topic and then view the top FAQs.
For example, if you select “startup advice and strategy” for the startup category then you’ll get the following results:
One of the top questions is: What are some great online tools for startups?
As of today, the post has received 166 answers and 174, 629 views.
This shows that people are interested in this topic and want to know the best tools and resources available.
If this is your niche, then for your blog post, you could come up with your list of best tools for startups: 5 Market Research Tools for Startups, or the 7 Tools That Will Improve Your SEO, etc.
The idea is to search for the questions that have the most activity in your niche, and create your blog or guest posts around it. There are literally tens of thousands of questions for each topic, so it’s unlikely you’ll run out of ideas any time soon.
2. Alltop
Alltop is an aggregator website that posts all the top stories from the best blogs and sites on the web. It answers the question, “what’s happening?” for virtually every topic imaginable. It filters out all the noise, so you’re only left with the best of the best content online. So if there’s just one place to get great ideas for blog posts, this would be it.
You can find all the top blogs and stories by doing a search for your topic and then selecting it. For example, if your topic is business, you would click on “work” and then “business”.
Once you’ve landing on the business category page, then you’ll see all the latest sites and stories from the top sites.
One way to stay on top of all the latest stories, is to subscribe to the most relevant and interesting blogs inyour category. You’ll need to create an Alltop account to do this. Once you’re logged in, all you need to do is to select the site and add it to your Alltop feed. This way, you’ll only be notified when those sites post the latest stories or blog posts.
3. Buzzsumo
If you don’t like guessing, and want to know what content is performing well right now, then Buzzsumo will help you do that with ease.
You can use Buzzsumo by searching a topic of your choice, and see which content that gets the most shares for each of the social media channels.
You can also filter by content type on the left to narrow your search. For example, if you plan to create an infographic for your post, then you can select it, and Buzzsumo will only show the best infographics with the most shares.
You can also filter by date, so if you want to see the most popular content of the past 24 hours or past week, then you can select it from the left.
There is a reason why Buzzsumo is used by the most prolific and authoratitive influencers on the web — because it works well for finding the best content that people want to read. It’s another amazing source for generating content ideas.
4. Scoop.it
Another great way to come up with blog post great ideas — or even blog title ideas — is to use Scoop.it. Scoop.it is a content curation and content marketing software that allows you find, curate and publish great content.
Even if you don’t plan to curate and are you’re just looking to get ideas for content, then scoop.it is still very useful as a tool.
You can find great blog post ideas by simply using their search bar for your topic. This will show all the top posts for the your category.
You can browse through the top articles and see what topics you can write about. Although you won’t the same level of analytics as some of the other tools out there, it’s still a great way to quickly find relevant content ideas for your blog and guest posts.
5. Twitter
Twitter is an amazing tool for getting ideas for your guest posts and blog. It has an advanced search feature that allows you to find all the best content that’s trending right now.
By going to search.twitter.com, you can enter your topic and find all the top tweets in real-time.
You can go through the timeline and see which tweets have gotten the most favorites, and re-tweets. This way you’ll know which content is being shared right now, and can create content around the same topic.
6. Podcasts
One of the best ways to generate ideas for blog posts is to listen to podcasts related to the niche you’re in. You’ll not only get a lot of ideas, but you’ll get a lot of new insights and increase your knowledge for your topic which will translate into even better content for your readers.
By browsing the itunes store podcast library, you’ll be able to find all the latest and top podcasts for your category.
Find the top podcast shows for your space and subscribe to them.
Try and listen to at least one podcast per day from the top podcasters. By the end of the podcast, you’ll have lots of ideas flowing through your mind which you’ll be eager to get down on paper.
As you can see, there are countless ways to generate ideas for your blog and guest posts. The only thing that will stop you from moving forward is trying to find the “perfect” idea and write the “perfect” post. There is no such thing. It’s better to get ideas and implement quickly.
So if you’re looking to quickly generate ideas, and get your blog posts created and published within a short time, then you can’t go wrong with using one of these tools as your idea generator.