Generating out of the box blogging ideas has become increasingly difficult with the increase in the number of blogs and blog posts out there.

There are over 500 million blogs in the world right now. That’s 1.5 blogs per American citizen. This means that there is a lot more you need to strategize for your content marketing than just starting a blog.

Standing out in such a market is all that more important because consumers have a nation of blogs to choose from. Something as minor as font style or page background color might prompt a visitor to switch to another blog if your content isn’t different.

This is why planning and ideating your blog’s content is just as important as the actual execution. Meticulous planning can help a business avoid first-thought and generic ideas, at the worst. At its best, brainstorming can lead to unique and out of the box blogging ideas.

Tips To Get Out Of The Box Blogging Ideas

In this article, we explore five simple ways to generate amazing blogging ideas and make the process of planning more fruitful.

1. Build A Bank And Then Break It (Not Literally)

Judd Apatow, arguably one of the best comedy screenwriters of this generation, writes down 100 ideas on a notepad, before eventually developing a select few, maybe even one.

If you’ve written down one hundred ideas, odds are one of them is probably a gem.

It’s not just about choosing one great topic idea out of a hundred bad ones. Once you’ve written all your blogging ideas down, you (and your team, if you have one) can revisit the ideas, analyze and critique them, and rework some of these ideas to become unique.

Having a bank gives you a fallback. This kind of security allows you to approach in-depth ideation with an open mind because you already have a base to work with.

It’s only a matter of making them different, if not better. And if the revisions don’t work, you always have the original idea to lean back on.

To make this task more challenging, try coming up with new ideas every time you have to create content for your blog.

One hundred might be an overshoot, but thinking of a handful of original ideas repeatedly might help you and your team develop a unique thought generation process and help increase the website traffic.

2. Dig Deep And Gather Audience Insights 

A great way to create relatable and unique content is to do insight research. This means scratching beneath the surface and gathering behavior patterns and educating yourself about the ‘whys’.

This can mean working with data to understand patterns in the industry by reading up on industry journals and taking time to observe what your customers and competitors are prioritizing.

If you cater to the day to day internet users, this can mean noting down behavior patterns you see on the daily, or visiting portals such as Reddit to read stories and understand how your audience thinks.

For B2C blogging websites, gathering insights can help you move past first-thought blogging ideas and onto topics that connect with your audience on a deeper level.

In the case of B2Bs, it can be very convenient to simply write about industry happenings. Writing about why certain trends happen, can take your content up a notch.

3. Crowdsource

Be it from the Internet, or through employees, friends, and family, maybe even your audience – a fresh perspective can prove invaluable in generating brilliant blogging ideas.

While crowdsourcing from personal contacts can be as simple as attending an ideation meeting, sourcing content from your audience may involve a barter.

Social media content giant, 9GAG, is a pro at this. By creating an allure around its brand image and buttressing that with its social media visibility, 9GAG has created a wildly popular video submissions portal.

For submitters, it is a free advertisement, for 9GAG it is a steady influx of content that stays unique by the sheer virtue of coming from different sources around the world.

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While most blogging websites can’t replicate 9GAG’s name-leveraging ability, they can run audience ideas and content submission contests.

Receiving ideas from multiple sources can also help a business identify the most commonly suggested topics and how they’ve been approached differently.

In weightlifting analogy, crowdsourcing can be a great ‘deload period’ for a content team that has overexerted their creative juices and needs a break.

4. Research The Competition And See What’s Missing

Nothing great is achieved in a vacuum. Most creators stand on the shoulders of giants to make their content novel. It is important to know the kind of content your competitors are putting out.

However, simply replicating their blogging ideas is both unethical and lazy. It is better to learn from your competitors’ mistakes and successes than to get on the bandwagon and be like them.

The ultimate comparison from the tech industry is the inception of the original iPhone, which was innovative, out of the box, device that was built to address the flaws of plastic keyboard phones that had existed before it.

A good way to gauge performance and quality is through numbers, comments, and shares.

• What does their audience have to say about certain types of content pieces?
• Which blogging ideas have done well in numbers and vice versa?
• How willing is the audience to share blog posts from a certain competitor?

You must ask yourself these questions before attempting to build on your competitors’ works.

Once you’ve learned what’s missing from their content, you can attempt to address them in your blogs. Learning from your competition can help you develop unique content that your audience needs but isn’t receiving right now.

5. Innovate The Format To Innovate The Content

Prior to 2001, Grand Theft Auto was merely a great 2D car-jacking game. But then in GTA III came out, with a 3D graphics engine that ascended the game from ‘great’ to ‘phenomenal’. Instead of coming up with a new story, Rockstar- the creators, changed the format and created a story around it.

Rockstar’s approach is a teachable moment. Using the same format over and over again can lead to a robotic, lethargic approach to idea generation and creative exhaustion.

Changing the creative format can help generate new ideas and topics that weren’t possible before.

How does that translate in blogging terms? Simply put, question your idea of a ‘blog’.

• Is it a traditional picture and a word-heavy website?
• Is it a video blog with explainer videos?
• Is it something different altogether?

Once you’ve answered these questions try and challenge your assumption. If you’ve been blogging the same way since your website’s inception, innovation might not be a bad idea.

That might not mean abandoning a tried and tested format, but simply dipping your toes into other formats as well.

Concluding Thoughts

Blogging has become a saturated market. This doesn’t even take into account internet giants such as Instagram and Twitter, which have helped spur the popularity of micro-blogging.

To survive in this market, a business needs to gather the unequivocal attention of their audience.

They can do this by abandoning first-thought ideas and attempting to create ingenious content that can connect with the audience, all the while making them feel like they haven’t consumed something similar elsewhere.

This requires meticulous planning and mind-mapping. Some of the techniques mentioned here are a good place to start.

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