Are lack of blog ideas holding you back from achieving blogging greatness? Good news - you no longer have to worry, because in this post I'll show you how you can generate over 100 blog titles on a single topic. All you have to do is decide what you want to write about.
Are you in the insurance industry, or maybe in finance? What if you manufacture sprockets, run a multi-service health clinic, or sell online software? There is always something you can write about on your company's blog. So it doesn't matter what industry you're in or the topic you pick, when you're done reading this post you'll have enough blog titles to keep you busy for months.
Blog Title Generators
The quickest and easiest way to generate blog titles is to head over to some of the popular online blog title generators. All you have to do is enter a few keywords and the generators will do the rest.
- Hubspot Blog Topic Generator
- Portent's Title Maker
- Title Tool
Try them out. They tend to be better for some quick ideas because after a while a pattern becomes noticeable and the blog titles become a bit repetitive. Yet despite this shortcoming, these are still very useful tools - I was able to generate over 20 unique blog titles related to my topic.
Placeholder Titles
Create a go-to file consisting of default blog titles that you can always re-use. Once you prepare this ahead of time, creating specific blog titles will be a breeze. My current list contains over 30 possible titles.
Here's a sample of my favorites:
- How to
I'll plug in my topic and easily generate at least 20-25 workable titles. Not every title is going to work every time, so pick your top 10-12 titles and add them to your content calendar.
Crowdsource It
There are many ways to crowdsource fresh blog titles and ideas. Send an email, pick up the phone, post it online or stop someone in the hallway. Ask a simple question, "Is there anything specific you'd like to know about [INSERTYOURTOPIC] and how you could use it?" Here's a sample of fresh ideas for blog titles I've received:
1. It would be useful to know more about what other companies are doing with marketing automation?
2. What a successful nurture campaign looks like.
3. How can I maintain relationships and send marketing messages in a non-manual way?
4. Can it be integrated with a CRM?
5. How does it even work?
6. How much does it cost and what is the ROI?
As you can see I got a variety of answers. Some are very specific and others are broader because the responses came from people with various backgrounds, specialties and experiences. And that's what you're after - crowdsourcing fresh ideas from many different people as possible. Now all you have to do is refine those answers into workable blog titles. This exercise alone easily produces at least 10 new ideas.
For more ready-to-go blog titles head over to Quora. Type in your topic and you'll get a list of Questions people have about it. Go through the results, take notes and add questions to your swipe file. I was able to find another 5 things I could write about.
Use A Swipe File
Swipe file is just a place, digital or analog, where you collect and save all your ideas in the same location. Personally, I use Evernote to capture everything. I have a section for Titles, Interesting Phrases, Design Examples, Landing Page Copy, Quotes and many other things that I could use for inspiration or future reference.
In my 'Blog Titles' swipe file I have a dozen or so interesting headlines I've come across online, as well as in the analog world. Cashier checkouts are great sources of inspiration. Just check out all the tabloids and pop culture magazines. I simply snap a picture of the cover and send it to Evernote. After a while you'll have a number of ideas that you could incorporate into your own titles.
Although this method isn't as quick as the others, once you build up your swipe file you'll have a quick access to fresh ideas.
Latest Headlines, Hot Articles And Trends
Do you subscribe to RSS feeds of the latest blog posts, latest headlines or trending topics? If not, you should. Not only will you catch breaking news or hot topics, but it will also inspire you to create a few more new topics as they come down the pipeline. Check out Alltop for an all-in-one stop for hot content and latest news. Take a look at your Topic area, as well as others that are completely unrelated. Are there any headlines that jump out at you? Can you incorporate your topic to the headlines you like? Of course you can. A few minutes of perusing through Alltop can easily yield another dozen or so blog title ideas.
Keyword Tools And Related Searches
Did you know that Keyword Tools are not just for generating keyword ideas? You can also use them to create a list of blog titles. Plugin your topic into your favorite keyword tool and you'll get plenty of ideas to work with.
Additionally, many search engines provide keyword suggestions and related searches with their search results. The suggestions are fairly decent, but if you want better results add one of the interrogative adverbs from the Five Ws and One H to your topic. You should be able to get a least a handful of ideas from those results.
Existing Data
Sifting through existing data is one of my favorite and quickest ways to get blog title ideas. If you've been tracking your website metrics and enabled online forms then you could potentially be sitting on a gold mine of blog titles.
Start with your web analytics software. Go to keyword sources and check out what visitors typed in to find you. Set a date range as far back as possible (way before Google encrypted keyword traffic), then use one of the interrogative adverbs I mentioned earlier to find questions people used to get to your website. Use the results to create a set of new titles.
I also hope you're not deleting any online forms that have been submitted through your website. It's a little bit more of a laborious process, but if you take the time to look through the archive of past messages you should be able to find more ideas. Often, when someone submits an online form, they have a question or a challenge they want you to solve. Be helpful and turn your website's inquiries into blog posts.
If you've been keeping a tally, in this one blog post I generated over 100 blog titles on a single topic. Not all titles are going to work immediately, but if you take the time to refine them you'll have a continuous flow of quality content that not only attracts traffic to your website but educates, converts and delights your visitors.
Finally, you can throw the 'I don't know what to blog about' excuse out the window. Ideas are everywhere. So the lack of them can no longer be holding you back from sitting down and creating remarkable content.