Fresh Out of Topic Ideas? Ask Your Tribe

When you’ve been blogging for a while on a particular topic or in particular niche, it’s not uncommon to feel like you’re running out of ideas.

Heck, it can even happen early on in your blogging career when you’ve gotten your first 10 or so articles under your belt. Or maybe you’re sitting there at your computer wondering if what you’re writing is what your readers are looking for.

Ask Them in Emails

Once you’re starting to build a following and a readership, even if it’s a small one, you can start asking your readers for topic ideas. This works particularly well if you took my advice from yesterday and started building a list. In that case, one of the emails you send to them on a regular basis is to ask them what else they would like to see on the blog.

Otherwise, you can occasionally mention a request for topic ideas in your blog articles or on your social media articles. Or add a note to your blog sidebar with a link to an article with a contact form.

How you get the reader input doesn’t really matter. The important thing is to ask them what type of content they want and then accommodate them as and when it is appropriate.

Don't Feel Obligated

Don’t feel like you have to honor every single request. Pick and choose the ones that make sense for your blog and that will benefit at least a few of your readers. Sometimes these requests will try to pull you off topic on your blog. Just ignore those and focus on the ones that make sense for what you’re doing with your blog.

How you make use of these requests is up to you. You can use them simply as suggestions and then write your own blog article on the topic. Or you can treat them similar to the email blog articles we talked about a while back. In that case, start with a little intro to the topic, copy and paste the reader's request and then wrap it up with your reply.

Sometimes this makes sense and it’s a great way to not only get the blog article written quickly but also share some social proof (you’re getting good questions and you’re taking the time to answer them on your blog).

Other times the suggestions will be so vague that you’re better off writing a blog article from scratch.

The Rundown

If you’re really lucky, you’ll get a great topic idea that will inspire a whole series of blog articles. Pick and choose and use whatever method works best for each request.