The Ideal Way to Get Blog Post Ideas

People, especially those I work with, sometimes ask me how I come up with blog post ideas. The ideal way for them to come together is through inspiration. I recently wrote a post called Sea of Consciousness from something I read in The Magic In Your Mind by U. S. Andersen.

I was reading the book before falling asleep a few days ago and came across a passage that just screamed “blog post” at me. I marked the page for the next morning. Once I was up, I sat down and copied the passage into a new post, then let it sit as I moved on to something else.

Inspired Posts are Idea Driven

All that I wrote in that first sitting was the passage from the book. No keyword research, no product, no tags, no category, no picture. I only gave it a title so that I could find the post when I got back to it.

A couple days later ideas came to me in the shower about how to write a post around the passage, and you can see the results by checking out the post for yourself. Then, as a bonus, thoughts came about writing a separate post about how that post came to me. You’re reading that one now.

Not all posts come this way of course. Usually my ideas for blog posts come from a specific goal. I want to write something to drive traffic to a specific page on one or more of my websites with the end goal of generating a sale. In those cases the keywords come first and I write content around them.

How to Write a Blog Post From an Inspired Idea

In the inspired case, the ideas come first. I let the passage sit for a couple days and let the ideas form in my head. I almost always do that regardless of whether it is idea driven or keyword driven. Once the ideas have shaped up, I write them down and fill them out into an article.

Once it was mostly written, then I went looking for relevant keywords that fit what I wrote and worked them into my content. Finally, I find a picture that I could use to put at the top of the post and added the picture of the book cover as well.

So if you want to be inspired with good ideas for blog posts, read books, watch movies and/or get involved in interesting discussions. Great inspired blog post ideas can come from anywhere.