Tapas Adhikary

Posted on Jan 27, 2021 • Originally published at blog.greenroots.info

How to find blog content ideas effortlessly?

#productivity #blogging #beginners #codenewbie

I have been writing blog articles for a while now and found that running out of blog content ideas is quite normal. But the good news is, there are some straightforward ways to fix that problem.

This article will discuss a few tips to make sure you do not ever get into a situation to think, What's Next to find an idea for your blog. I hope you find it useful.

Thanks to HashNode RFA for giving me the idea for this article!

Prerequisites

Before we talk about the how part, let us discuss a few prerequisites. These are going to make sure we are doing our part right without worrying about any external influences.

Ideas can occur anytime, anywhere

True, an idea can come anytime. We need to recognize, collect, and think about it. The more you think of it, the more you find ways to bake it for an article.

Let's take the example of last evening's debugging session. Two variables declared with almost the same names(fixedCalc and fixCalc) caused all the problems. Well, an idea may occur to write about the variable declarations, naming, scope, etc.

Log all your ideas

It is essential to collect ideas as a log, file, list, task, etc. My recommendation is to log all the ideas that come to you. It doesn't matter if something is small, large, trivial, difficult, etc. This list of ideas may help you to get a topic for your future article.

Here is my log of blog content ideas(as of today). I may not even write about some of these, or I may do, but I keep track of them.

Feel free to use any tool that suits you. Here are a few that I have tried so far, Notion being the favorite.

Fix your frequency

It is better to have a frequency set for publishing your blog articles. Knowing the frequency will help you to understand how soon you need to grow the list of ideas.

Finding an idea for publishing an article is like the supply-chain. The more you want to publish, the more you need to supply your ideas.

The How Part

As we have the prerequisites known, let us understand a few how parts.

Your old blog posts are gold mines

When you lack an idea, go back to your old articles that are published already.

You may find ideas in a couple of ways,

A comment on an article may give you an idea for a new article/series. I was encouraged to write about serverless from the comments I had received on the JAMstack series.
You can take a logical portion of your old article and write a drill-down(detailed) on it. You can even enhance it further to use it in a different context altogether.

For example, if you have published an article about 'Top 5 ES20 features', you can write new articles by explaining them in more detail with examples and comparisons.

💡 If you have written a step-by-step tutorial or a series before, there are higher chances to get new content ideas.

Seek, steal, and borrow from social media platforms

We all are aware, how powerful social media platforms are. We have lots to gain from it.

Follow hashtags, people of your interest on Twitter to get many ideas. If you do not have an account with Twitter, I would strongly encourage you to use it.
Quora is another great platform to get ideas from. You can search for topics of interest and read the discussion threads. Read the answers provided by others and find what may be missing. You may get an article idea from that to explain things better.
Stack Overflow is the final destination for many of us seeking the solution to a problem. Many of us also contribute to it with answers. You may want to see if a question ignites something or, reading through the answers may help identify a blog post idea.
Reddit is another platform to watch out for. Follow the community of interest to share ideas, answer questions, and get inspired.
Be part of a technology community like Hashnode, dev.to, Hackernoon etc. You may get plenty of ideas from the discussion threads.

💡 Getting inspired by a topic is perfectly fine as long as we deliver the content in our way with our unique flavor.

You may be ignoring something

At times, one content idea may give you multiple other ideas. Do not ignore the possibility of getting hidden ideas, knowingly and unknowingly.

For example, when you write about Looping through arrays in JSX, do not miss to write an article about Why to use the key attribute while looping in React. Breaking a big idea into multiple logical ideas helps to grow the list.

💡 Be practical about it. Do not downsize your articles too much for the sake of multiple articles.

Write about the problem solving

Do you take notes of the problems you solve at work? They are a great source for your future blog content.

Please take a good note of the solution and approaches to solve it. Think about how to represent that in an article. It can be a step-by-step tutorial, a description of a general solution, an explanation of why certain things to be done in this way, etc.

💡 Involving yourself in pet(side) projects is a great way to create technical blog content ideas. The more you do the side projects, the more you have the technology exposure to write about it.

Write about yourself

Why not? Write about yourself, your experiences. We all learn from each other's experiences. There is plenty to share and lots to learn.

You may want to write about,

The experience of getting your first job.
Interview challenges you have faced.
A certification that you are proud of.
Done a book review? Let others know about it.
Handled a challenging situation in the past? Worth sharing.
Overcoming the fear of something.
Many, many more...

These all can make great blog content.

Before we end...

That's all I do to find article ideas. I am sure the 'how' list is probably missing some points. How do you get your blog content ideas? Do you want to share some tips here?

Let's connect. You can @ me on Twitter(@tapasadhikary) with comments, or feel free to follow.

If it was useful to you, please Like/Share to reach others as well. The cover image is an improvisation on top of the work from freepik. All the gifs used in this article are from giphy.