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.