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A while ago – in blogging’s early years – people started blogs primarily to share their passions with the word – either for beauty, cooking, technology and so on. Or because they wanted their voices to be heard somehow.
In recent years, blogging has evolved, offering talented writers plenty of opportunities and gains – from professional recognition to substantial remuneration.
Thanks to quality content and a well-defined vision, some bloggers have succeeded in turning their websites into recognizable brands and profitable businesses.
Consequently, nowadays, more and more bloggers are starting projects, creating websites and writing to generate some extra income.
Furthermore, let’s not forget what a powerful marketing tool blogging is for businesses today.
However, whether you’re a blogger for a company’s website or writing your own blog, coming up with new, eye-catching blog content ideas can pose quite a challenge.
For your blog to succeed, three criteria must be met: it should have authenticity, consistency and diversity – while also resonating with your blog’s niche.
To help you in the moments you’re lacking inspiration, or if you just need to spice up your content calendar with some new blog topic ideas, here’s a list of the hottest blog content ideas in 2023!
1. Content Freebies
Freebies are free content pieces that users can obtain when entering a web page (usually a company’s website) in exchange for their email address.
In the marketing world, this type of material – whether organized as PDFs, guides, reports, eBooks and so on – is also referred to as a lead magnet or opt-in.
Above all, content freebies are created to offer a website’s visitors a particular type of value rather than selling something directly.
Businesses that leverage this content format do it so that they can get closer to their target audiences, this being a goal that implies multiple layers.
From email collection, to helping companies establish themselves in their key audience’s minds as the go-to source for future needs and information in a particular domain, opt-ins are among the most effective content formats.
Depending on each blog’s industry and theme, businesses can choose different content types for their opt-ins: from classes and tutorials to gift cards and more.
TIP: one of the most successful tactics used by brands (especially B2B brands) that create freebies is, repurposing content – either from webinars or from multiple existing posts.
2. Explanatory posts
These posts are a gold mine for bloggers and online readers alike, thanks to the knowledge, value, and, let’s face it – increased traffic potential they can bring.
Beyond traffic, explanatory posts are a great way of generating more backlinks – as they are usually perceived as linkable assets because of the help provided.
When writing an explanatory post, some bloggers may choose to offer an in-depth framework to solve different problems. In contrast, others may simply come up with a simplified, straightforward explanation for a particular phenomenon.
Either way, regardless of the approach used in the creative process, this type of post is extremely effective in helping bloggers gain authority in their niche and increase the blog’s trust level.
If you want to know what an explanatory post looks like, check out this step-by-step framework for beginners on how to make money blogging.
Lastly, if you need some inspiration for subjects you could cover in an explanatory post, start by looking for topics relevant to your blog’s niche in Google Trends.
Moreover, another great way of finding topics of interest that raise juicy questions that you can provide answers for, is to look for questions posted on social media.
3. “Ultimate Guide” Blog Posts
As its name suggests, “ultimate guide” blog posts are the most comprehensive and detailed articles on the internet.
They generally convey a complete framework, examples, tips, and answers to possible questions regarding a particular topic and are one of the most in-depth types of articles.
This kind of article’s inherent complexity means that it may require a different approach than the one you currently have for your other posts. Equally, it can raise a couple of challenges.
Given that an “ultimate guide” blog post is written with the intent of becoming the best resource on a specific subject, keep in mind it often demands a more exhaustive research process before starting to write.
However, “ultimate guide” blog posts are usually worth the effort and time invested, being one of the most effective blog ideas for increasing a website’s traffic.
If you’re curious about what a guide-type article usually looks like, you can take a peek at a complete guide to blogging.
4. List posts
According to Semrush’s 2022 Global Research – The State of Content Marketing Report, articles containing a list receive 68% more traffic than those without.
Actually nowadays, listicles, alongside guides, are among the top three best-performing article types.
Being easy to read and offering multiple possible solutions to different problems and needs, list-based articles are also one of the most shared content pieces.
Listicles can be created for numerous topics – from tools and hacks to books, podcasts or even industry experts.
To see some examples of these articles, check out this list containing the best books for bloggers to read in 2023 and the 21 best and most popular WordPress blog themes of 2023.
5. How-to posts
How-to articles are instructional posts that are primarily educational in nature, and one of the most popular article types of all time.
They advise readers on how to solve a problem or attain certain goals by providing step-by-step instructions.
With millions of people browsing the internet daily to learn new things and find solutions for all sorts of issues, how-to blog articles are an extremely effective way of directing attention to your blog.
Moreover, if compared to other blog post types, how-to articles also generally offer a slightly wider range of keywords that you can incorporate into your piece. Therefore they offer multiple ranking opportunities and higher visibility for your blog.
Here’s an example – let’s say your blog is in the social media niche, and you are thinking of writing about Instagram hashtags. While this is a rather general theme, there are a lot of angles from which you could write about Instagram hashtags by choosing a how-to approach. You can choose from how they work, how best to use them, how to optimize your Instagram hashtag strategy and so on, gaining exposure on multiple fronts.
6. Data-driven blog posts
Data-driven articles are certainly among the best blog post ideas, as this type of content frequently generates an increased number of high-quality backlinks for a website.
Again, depending on your blog’s category (company or personal), you can approach such an article in several ways.
Companies with a large customer database may have the ability to collect their own data through various means, including email and social media polls. Thanks to this, they may be able to realize in-depth, research-oriented articles with several premises, insights and conclusions.
For example, check out this TikTok research conducted by Semrush showing the hooks of viral TikToks.
On the other hand, there’s also always the option of creating a heavy-on-data post by putting together a bunch of statistics covering a certain theme.
If you’re curious to see an example of how this kind of blog post would look, you can take a peek at this content marketing statistics for 2023 article.
Most importantly when writing this kind of piece – as you’ll see demonstrated in the example above – is giving credit to all original sources.
While your effort, gathering such a large data set is admirable, it’s only fair to credit the original researchers.
7. Industry news
In such a competitive and dynamic business environment, staying up to date with the latest industry news is often the catalyst, launching a professional’s ascending career path.
As a result – in an attempt to get better at their jobs and gain a competitive advantage – people are constantly looking online for new trends and ideas related to their line of work.
Given the significant interest in industry-specific news, it would be a shame not to capitalize on that and put together this genre of article once in a while.
If you need some inspiration or simply an information source (particularly if your blog is in the social media niche), here’s how SocialMediaToday, currently the number one social media-related website specializing in industry news, organizes its content.
8. Incorporate Trends into Your Blog Posts
While most bloggers usually favor evergreen posts because they keep visitors returning for a longer period of time, articles related to the latest trends should not be overlooked when creating a content calendar. Especially when trying to stay ahead of your competitor’s blogs (which may lack this content or leverage it too rarely).
By leveraging trends as a regular blog post idea for your site, you can establish yourself in your readers’ minds as a top-of-mind, go-to source of information.
In the long run, this can help your website get plenty of recommendations and, therefore, increase your brand awareness and even conversions and sales (where applicable).
For this kind of post, there’s a wide array of approaches; covering the latest tools, technology, news and anything else related to whatever is currently trending in your niche, are all possibilities.
9. Review products and services
Since the very beginning of commerce, word of mouth has been one of the most impactful factors influencing buying decisions.
Moreover, nowadays – with the massive expansion of the internet in general and social media in particular – word of mouth is more powerful than ever.
These days, when considering a purchase, people tend to look for other opinions about the particular products or services, to see how reliable they are and if they are worth their investment. Especially when it comes to items with a higher financial value.
This is where review blog posts come in.
Being considered helpful and increasingly sought after, review articles are an amazing blog post idea, generating continuously growing traffic to websites leveraging them. This is applicable, especially with the expansion of the global market with more and more businesses year after year.
Moreover, these articles can also help to monetize your website more easily.
You should know that you can monetize a blog almost exclusively through product reviews by linking to product sites using affiliate links, such as those provided by Amazon Affiliates.
When writing a review article, there are a couple of things to consider if you want your blog post to be qualitative and generate the results you desire.
Once you’ve chosen the product or service you’ll review, start examining the competition – the current articles ranking on the first page of Google for your targeted keyword. Look at several factors, such as length and table of contents.
For optimum results, when starting to write your piece, try to cover the topics you’ve seen mentioned and also include some extra information. This will bring that added value needed for your article to outrank the top-performing ones listed on Google.
10. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Blog Posts
When creating your blog’s content calendar, remember that you need diversified content – for people in different stages of the marketing funnel. Or, to put it differently – for people with different needs and with different levels of knowledge regarding any given topic.
Depending on your objective for a specific blog post and your website’s goal, frequently asked questions are a type of article that can cover all three phases of the buyer’s journey – obviously, not all at once.
To state the obvious, a company’s FAQ articles may be very different from a freelance writer’s blog posts, the first being more product or service-related.
In this case, the frequently asked questions article can be created to target prospects that are in the consideration or even the decision stage.
To shed some light on the kinds of questions included in such an article, here’s an example: “how can problem X be solved using product Y?”
On the other hand, there are also more general questions that people need to find answers to – like the ones posted on Quora or those available in the “People also ask section”.
Examples of these questions are: “how long should a blog post be” or “what are the key differences between a blog and a podcast?”
Usually having high search volumes, choosing to write an article around frequently asked questions can generate a serious traffic boost, as there’s great interest around them.
11. Ask an Expert Blog Posts
This blog post idea can help you increase your website’s brand awareness with tremendous speed once you get a couple of experts on board to help you out and offer some tips and insights to include in your article.
Readers trust experts and take their recommendations seriously because of their proven experience and know-how.
Therefore, compiling a thematic roundup featuring well-known specialists will likely attract a serious number of eyes to your article, from all the people who value those experts’ insights.
These articles can help you expand your readerst, as you’ll win over the experts’ audiences as well. Not to mention the shares you’ll probably get on social media from the experts you feature, which facilitates your article’s visibility.
So, are you convinced to try it out?
12. Interviews
First things first, let’s establish the difference between an ask-an-expert and an interview-style article.
While both feature someone’s input about a chosen topic, what sets them apart is usually the format.
In an ask-the-expert article, most of the time, the interviewees offer a quote or briefly share some tips on a niche topic. Like “what types of posts are trending right now on Instagram” – to give an example. Which will need a short and succinct answer.
On the other hand, in an interview-oriented article, the guest’s teachings and the experiences leading to those are often covered in more depth. Furthermore, they usually explore multiple angles of the article’s main topic.
Probably the most important factor for a successful interview article, is not putting any constraints on the guest’s answers.
Whilst there’s a need to pre-establish a set of questions to be answered during the interview, it’s imperative to adapt based on the answers offered by your participants. Sometimes this will require side-stepping a certain experience or topic or, on the contrary, getting into the nitty-gritty of it.
13. Personal stories
Success stories are like a breath of fresh air for many blog readers because of the inspiration they offer to embrace new challenges or conquer old struggles.
As an example, think of Apple’s brand story – and how the tale of the largest technology company (by revenue) in the world, being born in Steve Jobs’s garage, led people to perceive it as one of the most inspirational brands of all time.
Besides Apple, plenty of other successful companies have relied on the power of storytelling and personal stories to gain people’s sympathy and shape their brand’s image positively. So, why not follow their example?
Sharing personal and relatable stories is an excellent blog post idea, as this type of article usually triggers an amplified emotional attachment from readers, ultimately keeping their attention for a longer time.
14. Productivity tips
Today’s rapidly growing and incredibly competitive business environment has led to highly demanding jobs – causing an ever increasing level of mental fatigue among employees. This leads them to constantly look for ways to improve their productivity.
Therefore, as there’s an increasing demand for productivity tips and hacks to fight burnout, choosing this as an idea for your blog can prove very effective for generating more traffic.
As a starting point, you could create an article about the tools and methods that help you stay organized and, from there, gauge people’s interest in such blog posts.
If this blog post idea seems to be effective in getting more eyes on your blog, you can start incorporating different types of articles related to productivity, such as time management tactics, like this one.
15. Myth-debunking
Truth be told, the amount of information available online makes it challenging to distinguish between myths and truths – and this is applicable to most fields.
To help your readers better understand your industry, you can put together the most common myths and present astute facts and evidence to bust them.
Here’s an example of how Brosix – an instant messaging app – leverages this type of content, in case you’re curious about how to approach this kind of article.
16. Gifs and memes
GIFs and memes are so widely used nowadays because they facilitate communication and human relationships overall.
Therefore, creating GIF and meme-oriented articles every now and then can help you gain your audience’s sympathy and – over time – build a more consolidated relationship with them. In the end – let’s face it – we all love and resonate with a good meme.
A GIF and meme article is likely to entertain your readers and possibly increase your shares.
When trying this fun blog post idea, here’s some advice: choose high-volume keywords and situations depicted that are common – so that more people will resonate with them.
Key takeaways
Hopefully, the blog post ideas listed have offered you some inspiration for creating a more diversified content calendar.
Remember it’s very important to leverage multiple blog topic ideas to keep your readers interested and make them want to read more of your writing.
Also, regardless of the blog ideas you integrate into your content plan, keep in mind each and every article should be written with your audience in mind, with the purpose of offering real value to your readers.
Last, but not least, for your content strategy to be effective, it’s paramount to conduct proper keyword research and always adhere to the fundamental SEO principles.
