Wouldn't it be great if you never run out of blog post ideas, ever again?
If you've ever wanted to use blogging to grow your business but haven't been able to do so consistently, now is the time to sit down and start mapping out a solid plan.
In order to blog consistently, you can't just wing it. If you do, chances are that when you come to write your blog post, you'd be staring at the screen thinking: "What should I write about?"
This is why it's important to plan out your blog topics for at least a month ahead. Even better, why not plan ahead for a whole year? That's what I do. Currently I have over 70 ideas filed away. That's more than a year's worth of blog posts, assuming I write a new post every week.
Want to do the same? In this blog post, I'm going to help you come up with a whole year of blog post ideas so you too can plan once and relax until this time next year.
The framework I use to help my clients come up with blog post ideas for a whole year
Below are 14 categories of posts that you could write about (you can tweak these categories to suit your own business if some of them don't apply to you). All you have to do is come up with 4 post ideas in each category and you'll have 56 topics you can file away in your ideas bank.
- 4 questions your clients ask you on a regular basis
- 4 problems your target audience experience and need a solution to
- 4 tutorials on a topic your target audience will love learning about
- 4 people in your industry you can interview
- 4 services/products related to your niche that you can review
- 4 people you can invite to guest post on your blog
- 4 behind-the-scene look at your business and how you work with your clients
- 4 before-and-after client case studies
- 4 "Best of" type posts (Examples: best blog posts you've read that are beneficial to your readers, best books you've read on a topic relevant to your readers, best apps for a particular task, etc)
- 4 opinion / prediction posts about something that's happening in your niche
- 4 posts about something you wish you knew 2 years ago (these posts will be super helpful to your readers)
- 4 myths in your industry you can discuss / debunk (Every industry has facts and fiction. Your readers will love learning what you think they've been doing wrong this whole time!)
- 4 topics you see people asking in Facebook groups / forums / other communities
- 4 ideas you can borrow from other blogs in your niche (I'm not suggesting stealing and re-posting other people's posts word for word! Rather, you can borrow the ideas and write your own pieces by either writing from a different angle or dig deeper into the topic.)
Never run out of blog post ideas again
You can use this framework to plan out posts year after year. And remember, you don't have to stick to pre-planned topics every time you blog. I regularly write about things that are on my mind at that moment. It could be a question a client has asked, or something sparked by the news, or something that's related to an industry hot topic at the time. But having an arsenal of blog post ideas means that you won't have to waste time staring at a blank screen and it will help make blogging consistently that much more achievable.
