If you want to include a blog on your website, you need a way to come up with blog ideas. Not only will that help you decide how to focus your entire blog, but it can also help you brainstorm for specific posts.
Some of the best ideas come from the questions you always hear, while others might take some research to validate. However, you can come up with ideas easily if you let yourself.
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What Are Blog Ideas?
Blog ideas could be as small as an idea for a single post, or they could be as large as a topic or subject you use for your entire blog. Because of this, you need a good blog idea to start your blog, but you’ll need to continue brainstorming blog ideas.
Without a good set of ideas for your blog, you won’t be able to create content regularly. While you can reuse the same ideas, you want to include some variety for your audience.
Topics or subjects
When you first create your blog, you’ll have to decide what topics or subjects you want to cover. You can have one overarching topic that your blog is about, and you can have smaller subjects within that topic.
As a flute teacher, your main topic could be flute playing. You could have smaller subjects within that, like tone exercises, practice techniques, or information on flute shopping.
If you primarily perform, your main topic could be about performing. Your categories could then be about booking gigs, how you prepare for performances, etc.
Brainstorming blog ideas for the whole of your blog can help you determine your focus, or niche. This will help you determine ideas for individual blog posts. If you don’t know where to start, contact me for help brainstorming some ideas.
Keywords
Individual blog posts can use keywords, which are words or phrases that you include in the post. Of course, the keyword is usually related to the subject of the post. However, you can use different keywords across different posts.
Coming up with keywords for things that people want to learn about will help you find some fantastic blog ideas. That way, you have a specific focus for each blog post you write.
How to Find Blog Ideas
When you’re looking for blog ideas, you have a few options for how to find them. At this point, you don’t have to worry how many people are searching for these ideas. Just get them down on paper, but to do that, keep your eyes and ears open.
The more observant you are of your target audience, the easier it will be to find some amazing blog ideas. Consider these things when searching for subjects to cover on your blog.
Questions you get
Do your friends or students constantly ask you the same few questions? If so, odds are that’s a good idea for your blog. Perhaps you’re the go-to person for performance anxiety, or maybe you’re into body mapping.
Whatever it is, if people go to you specifically, they know you know what you’re talking about. That means you probably have enough authority to cover that topic online.
Questions you see
Maybe you don’t get asked a particular question directly, but you see and hear it a lot. If you use a lot of music Facebook groups, you probably see the same few questions asked multiple times.
While you may not know the answer to everything, seeing a question over and over is proof that it’s common. If you do know a bit about the specific subject, you could take that question as an idea for your blog.
Problems you see
If you see people struggling with a problem, even if they don’t know it, you can use that in your blog. Perhaps you notice a lot of piccolo players complain about the high pitches.
You could turn this into a blog post on hearing protection for piccolo players. Feel free to get creative here, and it may take a while to validate these sorts of ideas, but they can be amazing.
Solutions you have
Along with problems you notice, you can blog about potential solutions. Perhaps you have a favorite pair of earplugs for when you play piccolo. If you find people constantly complain about the instrument, you could review your earplugs.
If you notice that your students get tense in their shoulders, you could write about tips to avoid that.
How to Convert Blog Ideas into Keywords
Now that you have a running list of potential blog ideas, it’s time to turn them into some keywords that people search for. While you don’t have to do this for your overall blog topic, you should do it for individual posts.
With the right tools and tricks, you can create keywords that will get people to visit your blog posts.
A keyword planner
You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to learn what people search for in Google.
When you put in a search term or two, it will show you how many searches Google gets per month for that term. You’ll also see similar terms that may have more results or fewer.
It also shows you how competitive those search terms are, so you can choose to target a specific term that gets enough searches without too much competition.
Consider synonyms
One of the things I love about the Google Keyword Planner is that it shows you similar search terms. This includes terms with synonyms to the words I initially used.
Perhaps your initial search term doesn’t have many searches per month. In that case, you can find a term with similar words that gets more searches.
Switching to the more common keyword will help you get more traffic from Google search results.
Find a balance
While you want to choose keywords that people search for, you also want to pay attention to the competition. If your keyword is just “flute” you could reach a lot more people, but you’ll have a lot more competition.
Instead of focusing on flute, focus on flute lessons or how to play flute. While not as many people search for those terms, you won’t have as much competition.
If you want to target a more competitive search term, balance that out with some less competitive ones for your other posts. That way, you can maximize how many people you can reach with your blog.
So…
How do you come up with blog ideas? Will you start using some of the strategies I mentioned? Let me know in the comments!