How to Come Up With Blog Post Ideas

“How do you come up with blog post ideas?” is one of the most asked questions I see in Facebook groups for bloggers. Most of us start a blog with a million and one ideas but then within a few months we begin to struggle. If you’re a DIY or craft blogger, you might hit a wall after you’ve shared every single project you’ve ever made.

When this first happened to me, I thought that Pinterest might be the answer. You know, I could scroll through Pinterest for a while and maybe a project idea would come to me. But what happened was the exact opposite. I scrolled and scrolled and clicked and clicked until I completely forgot why I was even there to begin with (surely I’m not the only one!)

Anyway, I have nothing against Pinterest, but it’s not usually the best place to find project or blog topic ideas (for me.) Especially since you’ll probably just be copying what other people are already doing.

So . . . I decided on another approach. One idea came from the good old days in high school. (Thanks to my 9th grade English teacher.) And the other came when I randomly clicked on one of those side tabs in Google Analytics (which happens to be a treasure trove of information.)

Two Great Ways to Come Up With Blog Post Ideas

Break out the index cards.

One of the ways I was taught to brainstorm a topic for research papers in high school was to outline the topic via the index card method. I’m sure you used to do this too. I would take a stack of index cards and write my main topic on one. Then I would write the sub topics on separate cards.

For blog post ideas, you do the same thing except use your blog’s navigation as the “topic”. Grab a stack of index cards and brainstorm as many ideas as you can underneath each topic. Alternately, you could try mind mapping. Google mind mapping to get an idea of how to do it.

The point is to come up with lots of ideas without thinking too deeply about them. You can delve into whether or not they would actually work as posts later.

Make Google Analytics work for YOU.

When I first started blogging, I dutifully set up Google Analytics, and then promptly forgot about it. I can’t remember exactly what drew me back to check it but one day I discovered the Behavior tab (pictured below), and discovered one of the best ways to come up with content ever.

Go ahead and open up your Google Analytics dashboard, and click on Behavior and then Overview. On the top of the page you can set a date range; I suggest at least a few months so you can get a good idea of the trends for your blog. You will see multiple posts along with their pageviews for that time period. Guys, this is gold. Why? Because you can see at a glance what posts are actually bringing traffic to your blog.

Take your top ten posts and think of one to two additional ideas that you can write about that are similar. For example, when I wrote about bullet journaling recently, I received some emails asking if I could write about how I arrange my blog planner in my bullet journal, so I wrote another post about that. Both of those posts have been doing really well.

Just One More Idea . . .

Which brings me to a bonus way to come up with ideas: what are your readers asking for? Do you receive emails or comments with questions that were not covered in a post? Is there something people consistently ask about? Write posts to cover those topics. If the topic is really broad, then break it up into a series like I did for this time, money, and organization idea. That series could potentially become an eBook or a course. You never know!

I hope this helps you come up with awesome content for your blog more consistently. It’s so important to be an asset for your readers.

Hope you have a lovely {and creative} day!