50+ Ideas for Your Side Project's Blog
One of the first things I do when making a marketing plan for a new project is to come up with as many blog post ideas as I can. This may sound premature, but having these ideas will prevent you from getting creative exhaustion or from not having anything to write about each week. A healthy backlog of creative blog post ideas is also a great first step to a content marketing calendar.
Over the past few years, I’ve written a lot of blog posts and I’ve seen a lot of these ideas work for myself or someone else. When you have a blog topic brainstorming session, read over this list before you get started. It’ll help to have some big-picture ideas that you can adapt to your niche.
Blog Post Ideas
Product/service awareness
- Highlight a little known feature of your product.
- Highlight use cases for your product.
- How to use/buy/setup your product.
- Customer case study.
- 10 ways to solve problem X (including your product).
- Mythbusting a problem your product solves.
- Compare/analyze your product to the competition’s.
- Do a screencast or record a video with your product.
- Share an excerpt from an ebook, white paper, webinar, etc. with a call to action to download it.
- Respond to frequently asked questions about your product.
Interviews and surveys
- Interview customers who are using your product.
- Interview industry specialists.
- Interview a competitor.
- Interview a professor, recent graduate, or someone who just retired from your industry.
- Interview speakers or sponsors at a conference.
- Ask a question or conduct a poll on Twitter and share the results.
- Do a survey with Survey Monkey (or one of these other tools) among your community members and create an infographic based on the results.
- Get experts to offer a tip and do a round-up of their recommendations.
- Feature guest posts from industry experts.
List ideas
- Compile a list of popular sites in your industry (be sure to notify them).
- Sum up the year that was.
- Compile the most popular blog posts on social media this month/year/week on your blog.
- Compile the most popular blog posts on social media this month/year/week on other industry blogs.
- Create a list of benefits for doing something.
- Create a list of some things to avoid.
- Find tips in other content, create a list of those tips and give links to those articles as the sources (just like this post).
- Share a list of conference takeaways.
- Collect the top motivational YouTube videos, ebooks, webinars or infographics for your audience.
- Collect Tweets from a webinar or conference hashtag, show them off with Storify and offer your own takeaways in the blog post.
- Create a list of trends to watch.
Thought leadership
- Take a stand on a controversial issue.
- Make a prediction related to your industry.
- Industry trends commentary.
- Side-by-side comparison of complementary company/service.
- Review a book your customers should read.
- Point out common mistakes in your industry and offer solutions on how to fix or avoid them.
- Relate your content to a current event or a celebrity (eg: “5 ____ Lessons from Lady Gaga” or “What the Election Teaches Us About ____”).
- Take the contrarian position on someone else’s article that you disagree with.
- Share your slides from a recent presentation.
- Respond to industry research with your own perspective. Offer a fresh angle to spark conversation.
- Do an in-depth case study about one company, or offer a few examples of how other companies do something successfully.
- Offer industry takeaways about breaking news.
Team/culture focus
- Company culture, mission, or values.
- Post about “What we’re not”.
- Create a music video for your company.
- Feature the team or each member of the team.
- Our stand on (current event).
- Post photos from a recent event/conference.
- Videos/photos of employees behind the scenes.
- If someone gets promoted, talk about how/why they were successful.
- Post about the current season or holiday.
Sources
Have your own ideas for coming up with blog post topics? Submit a suggestion as an issue on Github.