Five Ways To Generate Hundreds of Blogging Topics In Less Than An Hour

content marketing strategy that not only includes creation and promotion of digital assets, but also includes regular blogging on not only their company blog, but on other industry blogs. Producing a mass amount of content can be very hard and time consuming, but what’s harder is coming up with the topics to write about. In today’s post, I’d like to quickly run through five ways to generate hundreds of blogging topics in less than an hours time.

Mind Mapping

One of the first things I do when trying to come up with topics to write about is mind mapping. When I do this, I start with my primary keyword or theme and begin to brainstorm topics that are related to the original word. This is also referred to as word association. Here’s a mind map that I put together around the topic of photography: In just a few minutes time, I was able to come up with 28 topics to start writing about. If you need a mind mapping software to get started, I like to use XMind. It works both on a Mac and a PC and is a robust mapping software.

Polling Customers

Another way to generate great topics to write about is to ask your customers what questions they have about your industry. Once you have a nice list built up, you can easily task someone in your company to start banging out posts that cater to your current client base. Producing this type of content not only helps with your search engine optimization, but has also shown to help increase customer life time value by solidifying in their minds that you are a thought leader and the right company to continue doing business with.

Creating Buyer Personas

Another great way to come up with blogging topics is to go through the process of building true buyer personas. Once you define who your target audience is, what their interests are, and what buttons you need to push to get their attention and have them take action, you can then write content that caters specifically to their needs. For example, if I knew that one of my buyer personas is a stay at home mom, in the age range of 25-40ish, has three kids, and loves doing crafts, the topic for my content might be different than if I were targeting a dad, same age range, same kids, and loves the outdoors.

Competitive Research

One very easy way to come up with content topics is to do some competitive research. Check out each of their blogs, see what they are writing about, and what is getting linked to and shared socially the most. Don’t just copy their content, but create a similar piece and begin to promote it.

Content Roundups

Very similar to competitive research, another super easy way to come up with content topics is to monitor content roundups. See what authoritative figures in your niche are curating and get some ideas from them. The beautiful thing about roundups is that you can get dozens of ideas just from one post. If you don’t know what I mean by roundups, Kristi Hines is the queen of producing some amazing roundups. Here’s one she put together on link building. What other ways do you brainstorm topics to write about? Please feel free to share in the comments section below.]]>