Coming up with regular ideas for blog content is necessary if you want to keep your blog lively and regularly used.

These simple strategies can help:

Google Alerts

These are simple email alerts that Google send you about a keyword of your choice.

You need to confirm each alert you set up, so make sure you click the confirmation email link if one gets sent. Otherwise they will wait until you’ve done that in case a spammer has decided to sign you up for alerts you didn’t want.

You can choose the frequency you get alerts – don’t make that too often otherwise you’ll end up ignoring the emails rather than acting on them.

And you can choose the type of content you want to be alerted about. I tend to leave that as everything but you could drill down if you wanted to.

You can always change the settings if you find they’re not as useful as you originally thought they would be or if you’re getting too many (or too few) alerts.

I have quite a few alerts set and vary on how often I use each one but they’re good for a quick snapshot of what’s been happening around your keyword and I use them as inspiration for blog content.

Forums

These vary in usefulness.

A lot depends on how active the forum is and who’s posting questions or answers on any given day.

Because I’m in internet marketing, the forum I look at on a regular basis is the Warrior Forum.

Some days I can get several ideas for content for my blog, other days it’s completely fallow.

That’s the nature of these things – forums are like conversations in real life, they can go off in a particular direction for quite some time – but they’re also useful for recurring themes. I sometimes use recurring themes for pages on my blog (ones that stay in the menu bar) rather than posts on the assumption that more people will want to know about them – I tend to do that more on niche blogs than this one.

ContentIdeator

This is a site I’ve only recently found and I’m liking it a lot.

It’s where I got the title for this blog post – I changed it from singular to plural because I knew I wasn’t going to be focusing on just one topic but that’s it.

The number of suggestions varies according to the keywords you type in, so if you only get a handful of suggestions and don’t like any of them then play around with keyword variations until one appears that catches your eye.

Then use the suggestion – either “as is” or, like I’ve done here, slightly changed.

I’ll usually quickly copy and paste the suggestion I’m thinking of using into Google to see whether the complete phrase shows up in the first page of results.

Google Suggest

Probably my all time favourite.

The words that come up as you start typing.

These are based on current searches so they’re well ahead of the curve and you’ll get keyword phrases that are being searched for that often have low competition because they’re not in the the keyword planner.

Sure, you won’t know search volume but since the displayed figures in the keyword planner are fiction anyway that doesn’t really matter.

I tend to start typing and follow my instinct.

But if you want a slightly different approach then try this site which scrapes Google’s suggestions and presents them on screen for you.

Then create the content!

This should be obvious but so often it isn’t!

People think “oh that’s a good idea, I’ll do it later”.

And later never comes.

So a good plan is as soon as you’ve got one blog content idea, stop looking for more until you’ve created the content to go around it.

The content itself should serve a purpose.

That could just be fattening up your site – a feeder page for other pages on your site (something I don’t do as often as I maybe should).

Or it could be promoting your own products.

Or promoting affiliate products.

Or a mix of any of those – your choice.