Writing a blog post is all well and good, but first you have to decide what to write about. Sometimes you know exactly what a post will be about, but sometimes you need to come up with ideas. To help you with that, I’m sharing 12 questions you should ask yourself as part of how to brainstorm blog post ideas.  

Learn more about how to write a blog post here (featuring a free blog post template).

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How To Brainstorm Blog Post Ideas: 12 Questions To Ask Yourself

What topic can I write a minimum of 1500 words about? 

When thinking about this question, you shouldn’t only think about what you are an expert in. You don’t need to be an expert in something to write about it! Think about what topic (as general or specific as you want) you know a lot about.

You should know a fair amount about a topic in some capacity. But that’s not the main reason you want to be able to write at least 1500 words about it. 

When it comes to optimizing your blog for search engines – also known as SEO, a topic I’m going to get more into later – you need to be aiming for longer posts. 

Hubspot says that, according to their data, “the ideal blog post length should be 2,100-2,400 words” (x). And this is also true for blog posts designed to get you more leads (x).

So why do I say a minimum of 1500 words if Hubspot says 2100? That’s because you want to include links to your other posts (like I do after this paragraph), quotations to support your ideas (like I just used), and affiliate links to relevant products. All of this can easily add up to 600+ extra words.  

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Do I have a valuable take on the topic?

You don’t have to be the foremost expert on a topic, but you should ask yourself if your opinion or focus adds to the discussion positively. 

For example, I started keeping my POTS exercise protocol diary because I couldn’t find examples of patients trying it. All I found were reports from doctors, which wasn’t the point of view I wanted. I already knew what my doctors thought; I wanted to know what patients thought. I figured that, if I was looking for it, other patients would be to. That’s the value: a patient perspective on something that patients aren’t writing about.

Of course, it’s your blog and you should write what you want to. But assuming you’re brainstorming blog post ideas that will get you blog traffic, you want to make sure you’re positively adding to the existing conversation. 

Additionally, don’t take up space that doesn’t belong to you. While I should mention that racism negatively impacts getting a diagnosis in a blog post about the difficulty in getting diagnosed – because it’s a fact and ignoring it is just as bad as denying it exists – I’m white and shouldn’t speak as though I’m the expert on race factoring into medical experience. Instead, I should say that it’s a problem and then direct readers to people of color who have written about it. 

You shouldn’t write a post about a topic or point of view that doesn’t apply to you. Your voice on an experience that doesn’t apply to you is not nearly as valuable as that of people who actually experience it.

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Do I have a unique take on the topic?

Nowadays, it’s incredibly hard to find a topic or event that no one has written about at all. If you can find something, good for you, but it’s 2022. It’s incredibly rare. This is why you want to think about what topic you have a unique take on.

Again, you don’t have to be an expert, but you also don’t have to have a completely different take on a topic. Your perspective might be shared by many (which is why it would get website traffic), but it might not have been published much online. For example, I’m one of only a few patients writing publicly about the tarsal coalition condition in general and surgery for tarsal coalition, so I get a lot of hits on my posts about it.

This is also why behind-the-scenes posts are popular. Let’s use the example of a behind-the-scenes post from a fashion writer attending Fashion Week. It takes a situation that people might be familiar with, such as Fashion Week. It takes a particular profession or point of view, in this case being a writer. It also indulges humans’ natural curiosity by showing behind the scenes. 

Writing posts when you have a unique take on something is great. For one thing, this means that there are a lot of blog post ideas you can come up with based on this general topic. For another reason, because you have a unique perspective, these posts can bring you a lot of blog traffic. 

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If I didn’t have the expertise that I have, would I want to read about it? 

A great rule of thumb is to write what you would want to read about. ​​This can apply to a wide variety of topics. 

Would you want a comprehensive list of gluten-free restaurants in your city? Make one! Would you want a helpful guide for packing lightly but efficiently for a trip? Write it! Would you want … you get it. 

Thinking from this point of view can help you come up with more blog post ideas for a few reasons. One reason why is that if one person on this planet wants to read something, there is a 100% chance that someone else wants to read about it. 

If there isn’t a comprehensive list of gluten-free restaurants in your city, for example, I doubt you’re the only one who wants that list. I guarantee there are already people searching for it, and if you write about it, then you’ll get traffic from all those people looking for it.

But the other reason this question is a good one to ask yourself is that you don’t want to write about something that you, at some point in your life, wouldn’t want to read. 

Maybe you don’t need a comprehensive list of gluten-free restaurants in your city because you already know your favorites. But when you first cut out gluten, would you want to read a blog post about gluten-free restaurants? 

I don’t need to read blog posts about tarsal coalition surgery now because I only have 2 feet and I’ve already had the surgery in both of them. But 2008 me would want to read about it. 

On the other hand, don’t write about something you don’t like. It comes through in your writing and it’s not fun. Don’t force yourself.

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Is it specific enough? 

I frequently write very general posts – such as What’s Chronic Pain? What You Should Know If You Love Someone With It – but those are the exception. In general, I try to write specific posts. 

This is for two main reasons. 

One: Writing general posts is tricky because there’s too much to say. It’s easy to get overwhelmed writing them and they get very long. 

Two: General posts can do well in search engines if you use the right keywords (see below for more information on that) but often they will get swallowed up by bigger sites. So you can spend a lot of time on a post only for it to not be seen often.

So when you have an idea for a blog post, you want to ask yourself if it’s a specific enough topic. 

Take this post, for example. The larger topic is how to brainstorm blog post ideas, of course. But then I decided to focus on questions you should ask yourself when you’re brainstorming because that is a specific strategy for brainstorming. 

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Is it not too specific? 

On the other hand, your idea can’t be too specific. If it is, you won’t have a large enough audience to read it and you won’t have enough to say. 

I want to go back to the example of my blog posts on tarsal coalition surgery. I wrote a post before I had surgery to talk about the tarsal coalition condition in general and to explain what was going to happen. I also hadn’t talked about having tarsal coalitions before because the previous time I dealt with it I was in high school. 

That initial post was about my specific surgery. It included information about the tarsal coalition condition and the surgery, but it was focused on my upcoming surgery, which I knew was going to also include a bone graft and scar tissue removal. 

Later, I wrote about the emotional side of surgery recovery. I wrote that because I now had the experience of having the surgery twice and both times there was an emotional component to recovery. There was so much more to the recovery, but I decided to focus on the emotional side because that side isn’t talked about often and I would want to know about it going into surgery. 

Additionally, years after I had surgery and was fully recovered, I wrote about what patients should know when they have subtalar fusion surgery. I focused on that aspect of the surgery I had because it’s performed for tarsal coalitions, yes, but for autoimmune arthritis patients as well. I wanted to focus on what patients should know because there’s so much that doctors don’t tell patients because a) they don’t think it’s a big deal and/or b) it’s a normal part of their day-to-day. 

While these different posts are all specific topics, there’s so much to the topics. The first one includes explaining the tarsal coalition condition, the surgery in general, my history with it, and what else my surgery would include. The second one included the many different things I had gone through since my surgery and how they all affected me emotionally. As for the third one, there’s so much I would tell patients that that post could truly be a series if I wanted it to be. There’s so much to tell other patients about having that surgery.

These are all examples of how you want your topic to be specific, but you also want it to leave you a lot of space.

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Are people interested in the topic? 

Of course you want to write about something people want to read about. After all, what’s the point in writing about something few people are interested in?

Not sure really where to start figuring out people’s interest? Ask your readers!

You can use the poll feature on Twitter or in your Instagram Stories to guage interest. You can ask them if they’re interested in reading a post with yes or no answers. You can ask them which topics they’re most interested in reading about first, in which case you give them two or more options to choose from. 

Plus, you want to find the sweet spot between people wanting to read about a topic and that topic not being overdone, which you can evaluate through looking at SEO keyword results.  

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Am I interested in it? 

Like I said earlier, don’t write about something you’re not interested in. Blogging is supposed to be fun! 

It’s one thing if you hit a rut and get blogger’s block, but it’s something else if you rarely enjoy your time blogging, especially blogging about a specific topic. So make sure you’re writing about what you enjoy.

If you have to force yourself to do it regularly, maybe you’re not writing about what grabs you. It’s your blog; you should write about what you want to. 

And if you’re not genuine, it will be obvious in your posts. 

Additionally, if you’re not interested in blogging and/or your topic, you’ll eventually run out of things that keep you blogging. And blogging is NOT a get-rich-quick scheme, so if you started a blog purely to make some extra money, you are in trouble.

All of this is to say that you need to ask yourself if you’re interested in the topic. Unless it’s a topic you’ve committed to writing about for a sponsored post, you should never write a post that you’re not interested in to some capacity.

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What SEO keywords are available? 

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it means pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The goal is to optimize your site for search engines to find you. But checking out available SEO keywords is a great way to refine your post topic and see what existing interest there is in the topic.

Whenever I write a blog post, I pull together a list of 10-15 keywords and phrases related to my topic, and I do this before I start writing. 

I make this list before I start writing because incorporating them while writing results in a post that is optimized for search engines and sounds normal. If you write a post and then go through and add keyword or phrases it sounds like you dropped words or phrases in, which doesn’t sound natural. 

Another reason – which is also why I make a list of 10-15 words or phrases – is because it can help guide what I write. Seeing what people are searching for helps me see what I should write about and what people are interested in.

Ubersuggest is one of my favorite ways to find SEO keywords. Not only does it give you keyword suggestions based on what you search, but it also finds related keywords that aren’t directly connected to your search, long-tail keywords (aka more than 2 or 3 words), keywords in question form, and more. It will tell you what the search volume is for each keyword, as well as how competitive it is so you can choose the most successful keyword for your post. 

I add the keyword I’m thinking of using and select the option to get more keyword suggestions. That way, I can see what people are searching for and how many people search for it monthly, and if I see a keyword that grabs me more than what I was thinking of using, I can change the topics of my focus before I write the full post. 

Ubersuggest also shows you the average monthly searches for a keyword and rates the competitiveness of keywords out of 100 and color codes the difficulty of being seen in a search, with red as most difficult and green as easiest. I try to use keywords that FINISH

Additionally, I use the Yoast plugin on WordPress to help me optimize a post for one keyword in particular. The plugin helps you in a variety of ways, but one aspect in particular is by telling you if you’ve used a keyword as the main keyword before. You don’t want to have a keyword be the main keyword for more than one post, as it reduces the changes of either page being seen. 

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What blog post title(s) will grab people’s attention?

I like coming up with blog titles before I write the post because they help direct me to more specific blog post ideas. For example, I knew that I was going to write a post about how to brainstorm blog post ideas, but I also knew “How To Brainstorm Blog Post Ideas” was too vague and general as a title on its own. 

I started playing around with titles in the Yoast plugin, specifically the headline analyzer tool. That helped me figure out what title I could use that would grab people’s attention, which drew to my current title. 

I wouldn’t have gone with this format – 12 questions to ask yourself – if I hadn’t figured out the title before I started writing. 

That’s not to say that I always do it this way. Sometimes I do but then, after I’ve written the post, I change my mind and go with a different post title. But by deciding on titles that grab readers’ attention, I can come up with a more specific title or format that I would have otherwise.

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Have I written something similar before? 

It is totally fine to write posts that are similar to each other! In fact, it’s a good idea as long as they are not too similar. And if you wrote a post years ago, you can (and should) write updated versions of posts. 

The key here is to write different content; don’t copy and paste an old post to republish unless you make significant changes. Like, so many changes that it’s a totally new post. 

Since I’ve been blogging since 2013, I’ve written a lot of updated blog posts. Sometimes they’re updated versions of posts, such as accepting your chronic illness and 6 steps to accepting your chronic illness. You’ll notice that the new post is significantly longer and, honestly, a lot better. You’ll also notice that I link to the new post in the old post. That’s because you don’t want to pretend that you didn’t write an updated version – it’s a very silly thing to lie about – but it’s also because the old post gets a lot of traffic. I want to drive people who go to the old post to the new post, thus increasing my page views and decreasing my bounce rate. 

Get a free checklist to help you update your old blog posts here.

You can also write updated versions of posts for things that change over the years. For example, I have written posts about how I promote my blog posts in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. Another example is that you might write about your evening routine one year and then write an updated version a few years later because you weren’t a parent the first time but you are now. 

You can also get blog post ideas by seeing what topics people like reading about. Which brings us to our next point!

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If I have written about something before, was it a hit? 

After you’ve asked yourself if you’ve written about a topic before, if the answer is “yes,” you should see the response to the post the first time. 

Look at your Google Analytics results. What posts are popular, especially over the years? Those are posts you should use to brainstorm blog post ideas.

Maybe you have an idea for a similar post and want to see what people thought of the original post. For example, look at those posts about accepting your chronic illness. People really like the original post, but in my mind it could be a lot better, so I wrote a better version. After all, I’m a different and better blogger now than I was when I wrote that first version.

Maybe you’re trying to decide if you should write a follow-up to an older post. For example, many years ago I wrote about what I as a millennial with arthritis wanted people to know. Because that post was wildly popular, I wrote about more things a millennial wanted people to know. 

Want to learn more about how to understand your blog’s traffic with Google Analytics? Check out this post. 

50+ Incredible Free Blog Resources

As you ready to brainstorm blog post ideas? Do you want some more as jumping off points? Here are some resources to help!

• Get 164 blog post ideas when you sign up for my newsletter. Already a subscriber? This is in the resource library that you have access to!  
• Here are 31 authentic mental health blog post ideas
• Get my ebook for chronic illness bloggers ($10 but worth $240+), which includes 34 chronic health blog post ideas
• Here are 25 blog post ideas for beginners

Like this post? Share it! Then check out: 

What Blogging Platform Should I Use?, The Dos and Dont’s of How To Get Your Blog Noticed, Why I Switched to MailerLite from MailChimp for My Email Newsletter, Why Isn’t My Blog Getting Traffic?