Blogs thrive on good content. But your readers and Google have a voracious appetite for new content – ideally on a daily basis.

Which can be a drain on you after a while – coming up with good ideas for your blog posts needs creativity and inspiration:

Subscribe to news alerts

Google offers a free service called Google Alerts – just search for it and you’ll find it easily enough.

Set up a few alerts related to your blog’s topic and you’ll get a regular digest of new pages that Google has found that are related to that term.

Once you’ve set them up, these arrive with relentless regularity especialy if you’ve set up several different terms, so it may be worth setting up a new folder in your email program and sending them there. Then going through them when you need some fresh inspiration for your blog posts.

Do a few searches

These can be broad or narrow searches, it doesn’t much matter.

What you then do is skim the titles of the pages that come up in the search results.

For once, it could be worth clicking the option to go to the next page so that you get more than 10 ideas.

Or if you find one or two that promise a bunch of tips, open each one in a separate tab and glance through the tips.

You’re not going to plaigiarise them, just use them for ideas.

If none of the first page or two inspire you, use the suggestions at the end of the first page to drill down – it’s a bit like Google saying “other people who searched for your phrase also searched for this” and can turn up some ideas you’d forgotten about because Google sometimes include related searches rather than ones that include your original keyword phrase.

Browse Yahoo! Answers

This often comes up in the search results anyway but, if it doesn’t, go directly to Yahoo! Answers and type in your search phrase.

You’ll get real questions and answers a lot of the time and can use these for inspiration and ideas.

Browse a forum

Forums related to your niche are great places to get ideas.

Much like Yahoo’s site, they are used by real people.

Spend a bit of time on one or two forums, remembering to keep your ideas pad (or whatever similar thing you use) handy so that you can jot down all the different topics that crop up.

You could even kill two birds with one stone here by writing a long answer as a blog post and then doing a summary with a link to your blog as a forum answer.

Just a thought!

Feel free to add your ideas for getting good ideas for blog posts in the comments section below.

And if you’d like more help, check out my content creation crash course here.