Every blogger knows the challenge of finding topics to write about. Today, this blog will share some tips and tools about where to find current topics and fuel ideas for writing. One of the big hurdles to overcome when finding writing topics is finding something that interests a broad spectrum of your audience and readers. Here are some tools that can help fuel your creative juices and find some great writing topics.
Quora
Quora is a well-known question and answer site. One of the best ways to grab attention is to ask a question that other people have asked, and then answer that question, or even explore possible answers. The site lists trending topics on the side of the page. However, you can customize the experience for your needs by listing your interests. You can also reverse the experience to crowdsource information and ask a question yourself. You might even be able to come up with a new blog post just about your question and the answers you receive.
Portent
Portent is a fun site that helps you hash out an idea or a title for a blog by just entering a keyword or key phrase into the free online tool. To give you a better idea how it works to fuel your creative writing juices, I entered the word “blogging”. Here is what I got:
When I hit the refresh button, it changed to “Why Blogging is Lamer than James Franco.” I tried the refresh button one more time and got, “16 Ways to Become the MacGyver of Blogging.” Get the idea now? So it doesn’t give you the topic exactly, but steers you in new and creative directions for your writing.
Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator
Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator works in a similar way to Portent’s tool, but it gives you different ideas and asks you for 3 words, preferably nouns before giving you a whole week of ideas to write about that same topic. This time, I entered in “social media,” “marketing,” and “blogging.” Hubspot’s generator came up with these great ideas.
Once again, I gave it another whirl to show you some more examples of what this tool really can do. Same three keywords, and it came up with:
- 10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Social Media
- 14 Common Misconceptions About Marketing
- The History of Blogging
- 15 Best Blogs To Follow About Social Media
- 10 Signs You Should Invest in Marketing
Not all of the ideas may work, but they will likely help give you a boost or an idea you didn’t have before.
Soolve
Instead of generating ideas, Soolve.com helps let you know what popular search terms are for a keyword or keyphrase. The tool instantly shows you popular search terms on Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo!, and Answers.com. Depending on the word you search, you might see the keyword searches from other popular websites such as eBay, the Weather Channel, or Netflix. This helps you mine keywords and also find trending ideas surrounding those keywords.
Google Trends
Google Trends is one of the most well-known free tools for harnessing the power of Google and seeing what the trends in searches are. Hot Trends will give you a live feed of popular trending searches. Each term is clickable so that you can explore it further. If you want to know what searches are popular or trending at that moment, this is an excellent way to quickly see and explore that. You can filter the tool to your location or any country you want.
Daily Briefings
Daily Briefings is a comprehensive tool from Isentia that helps you get a head start your day with your key media coverage so that you know what exactly to expand on and how to engage or interact. Knowing where your media coverage is each day is an important piece of knowledge that allows you to continue to build your content throughout the day. The customization features of this tool help you get concise pieces of information so that you can immediately get an idea of what is happening right now, each morning.
King Content
Of course, if the task of sourcing new content ideas becomes too much, you can always hire the professionals to do the job for you. If coming up with new ideas and writing content to fit in with your goals doesn’t come easy to you, you are not alone. Try a content service like KingContent.com and see how quickly and easily someone else can write your content for you.
Summary
Each of the 6 tools we featured today can help you be a better, more informed, trendy, creative, and clever writer. Content is so important for the marketing department in companies today, and keeping your skills sharp and fresh is easy with these tools. Most of these tools are free, or have free trials or components, so you can give them a shot and see which one works for you. To recap, we have Quora, a social question engine, and Portent, which helps you hash out a topic based on a keyword. Hubspot’s topic generator helps you get creative with your content, and the subject line Soolve, which helps you sort through trending searches across various web platforms. Google Trends’ Hot Trends provides an instant list of trending topics and lets you explore each one, and Daily Briefings puts your media mentions in your inbox first thing in the morning so that you can build upon them and connect the dots. Lastly, another option is to hire a professional content writing firm to help you achieve your content goals. A resource like KingContent.com is a great way to bring your content marketing to the forefront of your marketing efforts.
