If you’re a blogger, you already know that sometimes the hardest thing to do is come up with new content for your blog. Finding ideas for your blog (especially if you regular publishing schedule like we do – at least one post a week on Mondays) can often lead to you not blogging at all, because you start hitting the wall when it comes to finding topics to blog about. So I thought you might find it useful to share 25 ways to use the web to find fresh content for your blog. And of course, most of these tips work just as well with creating content for your E-newsletter, email marketing, website copy, article marketing campaign, etc!

Blog Comments

1. Using a plug-in like CommentLuv allows your commenter to share their most recent post. I’ve seen blog titles that have intrigued me and clicked through to read, which then have given me ideas for a post of my own.

2. If you see a comment that really resonates and offers a unique viewpoint, contact the poster directly and ask if they’d like to guest for you and expand on their original comment. Very often they will say yes!

3. Similar to above, if you see a comment you disagree with, expand your own view into a post and offer reasons why your viewpoint is different than the counter-point.

Other Blogs

4. As pointed our in #1, CommentLuv is great for sharing the most recent post of a blogger, but not every blog uses it. So click through the URL of someone’s comment and see what they’re writing about, to see if you can gather ideas from there.

5. Blogrolls. While some have called blogrolls out of date, many bloggers still use them to share what they’re reading. Visit the blogs that your favorite blogger reads, and see what ideas you can glean from them.

6. Many bloggers have category lists for Top 10 Tips and other popular posts in their main navigation menu. Take a look and see what’s there, and use these to construct your own content.

7. Talking about popular posts, if a blogger has their most popular posts on display in the sidebar, click on a few to read and see what made these specific posts so popular. Then see how you can take this inspiration and apply it to your own posts.

Social Bookmarks

8. Delicious is a fantastic resource for finding blog content. Just type your topic into the Delicious search bar and you’ll find a ton of results from people that have saved articles or blog posts about your chosen topic.

9. Stumbleupon is a very cool add-on for your browser which lets you browse websites at random. You can land on some great content that will give you your own ideas for your blog.

10. While not quite as popular as it used to be, Digg still has some great shared posts and news on its site, and can be a great tool for finding new content ideas. Look at the most popular posts and see what new take on these topics you can offer readers.

11. BizSugar concentrates on small business news, and is rapidly gaining in popularity. If your blog relates at all to this niche, you can get some really good story ideas from here.

12. A mix of social community and bookmarking service, Blog Engage is similar to Digg and BizSugar with its voting system, but it focuses a lot on just bloggers and is another great starting point for subject ideas.

Blog Resources

13. One of my favorite blog communities is Scribnia. You can find authors and bloggers based on niches, and this can really help you target the content you’d like to get inspiration from.

14. Alltop offers a great collection of blogs in a myriad of different topics – if you can’t find something to write about there, then you really are stuck!

15. Still viewed by many as the Blogger’s Bible, Technorati has more than 133 million blogs registered within their site. Use the top topics or categories to discover content you can get ideas from.

16. Google Blog Search is a resource which offers a treasure trove of information on every topic under the sun. Much like Technorati and Alltop, use the search tool to find your interests.

17. Another popular resource from Google is their “Trends” portal. If you’re a quick writer, you can write a blog post about a trending topic right now – optimize it for SEO – and hopefully be found by those looking at the trends at that exact moment!

18. Junta 42 offers some great tips on content marketing – check out their articles for ways to get ideas for your own blog. find content for your blog

Social Networks

19. If you’re on Twitter, one of the best ways to find content for your blog is to jump into the weekly #blogchat discussion. Great bloggers, great topics – what more do you need?

20. Staying with the Twitter theme, take a look at what’s trending right now on the platform to see if you can get a post written quickly about it. Just don’t be overly spammy with your hashtags.

21. Once again with Twitter, Twitter Search is great for finding out what people are saying regarding the stuff you blog about – type in your keyword, and see if the current conversations give you inspiration to expand on their topics in a new blog posting.

22. A great application on Facebook is called Networked Blogs, which shares content from Facebook users with blogs and also the Networked Blogs directory itself. You can get a widget with different blogs in it, and use this to build some thoughts for your own content.

23. LinkedIn Groups are perfect for finding blog content. Find an appropriate question being asked there and then write a blog post as the answer.

24. Slideshare is more the just a place for file and document sharing has great presentations that are just chock full of ideas for you to take away and build several blog posts from.

25. In the same way as Slideshare, YouTube is also much more than just a video upload site – think about grabbing a Tips and Advice video, as an example, embedding it into a blog post, and then talking about what else could have been said or added to the video to make it an even better resource.

With these tips, you should be able to find plenty to talk about in your own blog. But for some folks, finding appropriate fresh content isn’t the problem – the time required to track it down, write and edit a blog post, and then uploading it – on a established schedule is the problem. But regular readers of our Hat Trick Associates blog already know that having well written, fresh content on your site very frequently is a critical KEY to having a superior SEO ranking – to convert current visitors and bring new ones in the future.

If you are having trouble finding the time to research and write your regularly scheduled blog, or don’t quite have the desire or writing expertise to get it done efficiently, look into our very cost effective blogging services.