10 Methods for Getting New Ideas and Inspiration for Hot Blog Topics

How To Find Inspirations and Research Blog Topic Ideas for Your Next Bog Post

Whether you are blogging for profit or blogging for passion, you may have experienced a situation where you go blank on what to blog about.

The fear of running out of blog topic ideas, or not knowing what topic to blog about is one of the major reasons why some people, although aware of the benefits a creating a new blog can provide their business, are yet to take their businesses online. In times when you run out of what to blog about, you need inspirations to give you ideas of your next blog posts, and this post discusses how to get needed blog writing inspiration to banish your writers’ block blues.

This post is a follow up to a previous one titled “Reasons Why Some Bloggers Run out of Content Ideas and How to Avoid It”.

In this post, I give 10 methods to research hot blog topic ideas to ensure you never run out of blog topics, and always have hot traffic pulling blog topics for your readers.

How to Research Hot Blog Topic Ideas for Your Blog

1. Keyword Tool
Let your prospective readers (aka customers) tell you what they want to read, and ensure to listen to them.

Use Keywords Research Tools to dig up key phrases that your prospective customers are currently querying in the Search Engines, so that you can build these words into your blog posts.

Doing this will ensure that your posts will show up at the top of the search engines when your target customers come searching. Here’s how to go about digging up those hot phrases:

• Write 10 keywords around the blog topics you have in mind, to write on.
• Next go to Google Keyword Tool and type in your desired keyword -> Choose 5 to 10 most relevant keywords with the highest search volumes.

2. Poll
This is another way to listen to your market needs, but here an even more specific market – your own readers and subscribers.

• If they ask of you or suggest blog topic ideas, they are more likely to read it – and you gain their loyalty. You know it’s hard to get a few first time readers and so whatever you can do to keep the ones you already have happy, do it fast.
• Ask your readers and /or subscribers for blog topics they’d like to read about. Find the questions asked by most people, to get an idea of the most recurring areas of needs.
• You can leave a question on your side bar or send it to subscribers via email, asking their suggestions on the blog topic ideas they would like to see on your blog.

3. Amazon.Com

Knowing the books your target customers (readers) are buying the most will give you an idea of the kind of topic your prospective customers would be most interested in reading. Amazon.Com is a good place to get writing inspiration and blog topic ideas.

The best selling amazon books on your market niche are an indication of  the kind of blog topics your readers would be interested in.  Use your keywords to search for best-selling books on Amazon.Com. Note what the topics are on. Read the book reviews to get an insight of why the readers like the books – those are hot buttons and should give you ideas current market / readers’ needs to blog about.

4. Forums
The forum is a very good way to enter the minds of your target customers. This is because many people go to the forums looking to get insights on issues from others who “know better, from experience”. They come asking questions and seeking advice, to enable them make decisions.

There are two ways to do this. The first is visiting the known Forums (in your market niche) and the second is letting Google lead you to Forums discussing topics on your keywords.

Forums can give you an idea of what your prospect is thinking of, the questions they are asking, the problems they need to solve. Those are “unfilled needs” and you can write posts to address them, so that your post can have a chance to show up when someone is searching for answers on that.

Method 1: Visit 5 to 10 popular forums in your niche. Search for the most active topics with the most responses. Go in there and read through the posts to get ideas – what questions are recurring among the forum posters? What words are recurring? The posters asking questions could just be your readers and your readers may be having the same problems and interested in the answers you can provide.

Method 2: Google Search under Discussions is great at providing blog topic ideas. In the Google Search sidebar, you’ll find results from forums and groups.

Type your key phrases in to Google Search box. Then click “Discussions” on the left side bar, under “Everything”. Next scan about 5 or more forum and/or group websites in search results.

How would you find hot blog topic ideas? Look out for topics with high number of views and / or replies; observe recurring patterns, words and  terms. Those are hot blog topic ideas on unmet market needs.

After this you can go do some research and blog a response on the topics and even come back to the forums to provide quality answers to the forum questions, thus showing off your “expertise” subtly. Many forum members would certainly trail you back to your blog URL in your signature.

5. Other Blogs
Other Peoples’ Blogs (OPB) are good sources of blogging/ writing inspiration. The idea here is to follow the leaders and trend-setters in your niche. Follow but do not copy their works.

What do I mean here? Take a timeframe of the past 30 days and see “what’s hot in the leaders’ circle”, what’s trending in the top blogs in your niche.

That should give you an idea of “what’s hot” in the market. This is a lazy man’s way to piggy-back on those that “everyone knows” always put forward their writings only when they have done a proper market research.

There are three ways to do this. You can either start from the popular blogs you know of in your niche and/ or let Google or Technorati tell you the blogs writing posts on your keywords.

Method 1: Start from the known. Visit and scan 5 to 10 blogs that are popular in your niche.

Look out for posts within the past 30 days. Are there any recurring, similar trends in their posts? If so, that should give you an idea of what’s trending and hot topic ideas.

Method 2: Technorati.com Blog search

• Type in your keywords into the search box of Technorati and Hit “Search”
• Click “Click to refine this search“ and you will see results displayed as in the image below
• Ensure to refine your search by selecting “Posts” and “Blogs”
• You may want to play around with the High, Medium, Low and Any Authority – from the drop down menu
• Next choose to “sort results by date”
• Go to the search page where you’ll find posts at least 30 days old
• Look at the posts and the number of comments they have. Pay attention to posts with lots of comments. The posts with very few comments indicate topics readers are not very interested in.
• Now, take a few of the most related posts with the most comments, say 5 to 10 of them
• Read the comments, scan for readers questions and recurring patterns in the comments. Identify recurring excitements – what are most readers expressing excitement and gratitude for, with regards to the post. These are pointers to what your readers would like to read about.

Method 3: Google Search Blog-search

• Type in the Google Blogsearch URL (http://blogsearch.google.com/) in to your browser’s address bar
• Enter your key phrases and hit the “search” button
• Search for posts within the past month to see the top ranking blogs in your niche
• Scan the first 10 blogs in the top results
• Identify trending terms and popular topics

Remember, you are looking for trending terms, for hot topic ideas.

Commenting on the top 10 blogs for your keywords is a good method to get backlinks, apart from the fact that a sentence in a blog your are reading can immediately ignite a blog topic idea – an eureka moment.

6. Google Search

You can play around the Google Search options to find hot topic ideas.

Explore the following Google Search features:

• Blogs
• Videos
• News
• Discussions: You’ll find results for discussions in forums, groups, answer sites such as Yahoo Answers etc.
• Books

You can also filter your search by date, for instance select a category and sort by pat months (i.e. past 30 days).

So many ways to refine your search and dig deeper…

7. Yahoo Answers

Yahoo answers is another place to get blogging inspiration and blog topic ideas. Research to find what people are asking about, that is related to your niche? Go to Yahoo Answers.com and research for your keywords.

Remember to look out for what many people are asking. If many people are asking, it suggests that you can step in to provide answers on your blog – to get found when more people search for answers on that question.

8. Article Directories

Ezine Articles is the biggest article directory for researching blog topic ideas – this article directory would give you a good insight into what is hot in your market.

Go to ezinearticles.com and type in your keyword. You may also want to check under the category of your market.

Look out for articles of 30 days old or more. Use the same method as above to find the hottest authors (in topics in your market niche) are writing about, and that readers are showing most interest in via comments?

9. Your Blog Comments

Your comments section might also help you find inspiration for new articles/ posts. Readers’ comments and questions in the comments section can provide you insights and inspirations on what to blog about. Respond to commenters’ questions and concerns. Doing this will help you learn more about your readers wants and sometimes get you going out of your comfort zone to research and find answers to satisfy your loyal readers.

10. Your Analytics/ Stats

What are your stats telling you?

• What posts are most popular? An indication that if you write more posts or serialize the popular posts, you’ll get lots of readers.
• What search terms are leading many people to your blog? What posts are being read by most visitors from the search engines?
• What posts are least popular? Can you jazz them up or optimize them in anyway to bring attention to them?

Perhaps people want to read your post but your keywords are making your post difficult to be found – a case of what you think you are saying is not conveying the same meaning to people:

• Maybe the title is not attention grabbing? The title many make an interesting topic look drab from afar?
• What posts are bringing the most comments?
• What posts are getting lots of retweets?

You stats give you an indication of what to keep doing and what you need to optimize or tweak. Sometimes, when I feel a post is not getting read as much as I anticipated, I noticed that when I tweak the titles a bit, tweak the keywords (after doing a bit of keyword research to find better keywords) I see that post getting read more – an indication that the title and/ or keywords were keeping it in hiding.

Finally…

I hope you’ll take action to research blog topic  ideas that your readers would love. This is very important because you want to be able to give them exactly what they want so that they’ll always come back for more, and even tell others about your blog.

Once your blog readership keeps growing, you’ll find be motivated to keep researching more hot topics for writing inspirations and you’ll never run out of topic ideas again.

Writing on the exact topics that more people in your market are searching for would provide you the best opportunity to be visible in the search engines. You know that more visibility equals more traffic and more sales, and of course more cash.

Over to You…

What have I missed out? What is your favorite method to research topic ideas for your blog posts and articles?

I look forward to your comments and ideas.

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To Your Blog Writing & Online Marketing Success!

Stella