5 Ways To Find Your Next Big Writing Topic
By: John Teehan
Tags: Collaboration, Freelancing, Blog, Creativity, Writing

Photo by Anna Auza on Unsplash

5 Ways To Find Your Next Big Writing Topic

The best resources are right in front of you.

How many times have you asked yourself this?

What am I going to write about?

No matter how many years you’ve been in the content creation game, this is a question that pops up repeatedly. Sometimes it seems like we’ve written everything we can within our niche or select areas of knowledge. Whether it’s for pitching an article or a blog, finding the right subject and angle to start with can be a daunting challenge.

And damn that blank page.

The situation is far from hopeless. There is a universe of resources at your fingertips. Some of these suggestions may already be familiar to you. I guarantee at least one or two will be somewhat new.

Consider pulling your ideas from sources like these, and your well of ideas will never run dry.

Gatherings with peers

I’m going to start off with the method that inspired this very piece. Gathering with your peers and colleagues.

Every other week, a bunch of us freelance writers gets together online using one video conferencing service or another (lately, it’s been Zoom) for an informal dinner. Most of us order takeout that night and use these meetings for some much-needed socializing. We’ve been doing this long before COVID because the life of a freelancer tends toward isolation already. This was a way we came up with to make sure we had some form of facetime with other human beings once in a while.

We don’t usually have any “meeting agenda” for these gatherings. We often talk about work, but we’re just as likely to talk about our families or other things happening in our lives.

However, this particular time, the unofficial mentor of the group posed the question, “How do some of you come up with blog topics?”

That one leading question — which I’m sure he laid down on purpose — sparked a conversation that lasted the rest of the evening.

We talked about some of the methods I describe below. Many we used in common. Some were new to many of us. It was a great conversation, and it ended up, from there, turning into a brainstorming session where we pitched each other blog topic ideas.

I walked away with enough potential topics to cover a month’s worth of posts.

Make use of your colleagues and friends to help generate ideas. It’s even better when their niche isn’t the same as yours because they aren’t constrained by the idea that a particular topic is overdone or unworkable.

It’s a helpful, fresh perspective.

Peruse the industry news

Stay on top of the various online news sources related to your niche or industry. This is a great way to see what’s important to businesses and the angle they’re taking. A lot of my writing work involves cybersecurity, cloud computing, and technical business solutions for small-to-medium sized businesses. There is no shortage of websites with news and articles covering these topics.

I have a unique email address that is only used for newsletters and news updates, and I have a special links folder for my favorite news pages. These make great jumping-off points for you to find your own unique angle on popular industry topics.

Don’t copy or lift whole sections from your sources. That’s just heinous. And embarrassing if you’re called out on it.

But if you see a lot of articles on blockchain and the US post office, that might be a clue that a similar piece placed on the right blog could generate some readership. It’s a trending topic. All you need to do is decide your angle.

You can do this with any industry. I’ve written for real estate, estate law, and industrial machinery. I’ve never been at a loss for industry news to tap into.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Check out Google Trends

This was one of the new methods recently introduced to me. I’ve never considered using Google Trends for spotting the hot topics of the day.

Unlike traditional keyword research, Google Trends can tell you what search topics get the most views in real-time. This is incredibly useful if you’re writing in a niche, such as pop culture or electronic gaming, where the news gets old fast.

In case you were wondering, as of this writing, “blockchain” is getting a lot of activity — particularly around Washington, DC.

From there, you can use search trends to examine different sub-groups to get a more precise idea of capturing people’s interest in your niche. You can even conduct keyword searches that scan blog posts, trending news, and individual keyword search activity.

Using Google Trends, you can decide what topics will be sure-fire winners and which might be losing steam.

Have you checked social media lately?

Of the topics we discussed over dinner, Google Trends was the newest to most. Scanning industry news was a standard method for many.

Mining social media for blog or article ideas was surprisingly underutilized, but mostly because people didn’t make much of a connection between using Facebook or Instagram as a resource for writing topics.

We talked about it and decided there was no good reason why we shouldn’t use social media to help nurture ideas. Facebook seems too political these days, and Instagram a bit too visual. Then, when we started talking about Twitter and even did a quick check of our Twitter accounts between bites of lo mein, we found Twitter to be a veritable gold mine of potential topics.

It wasn’t so much the news feeds that revealed a rich vein of topics, but using Twitter’s search feature on specific keywords revealed Twitter’s own take on trending topics and who’s talking about them.

It was kind of like using Google Trends but on my phone’s Twitter app.

Taking what I learned with Twitter, I did some similar searches on Facebook and Instagram and, while not as useful, did yield some topic trends that were worth exploring further,

Social media… it’s not just for spreading memes anymore.

Remember user forums?

There are still websites around with active user forums. These are actually kind of interesting places to visit online. These are generally the more dedicated fans or user base of a particular topic.

To be honest, most of us forgot these online places still existed. At most, we occasionally hit one while trying to troubleshoot a mechanical or computer problem, but they weren’t online spaces any of us regularly inhabited.

While many forums have search functions, you might have better luck just browsing forum sections — especially the newer posts — for topic ideas.

And you don’t have to rely only on private website forums to mine ideas. Places like Reddit and Quora count as forums, and there is certainly no shortage of interesting conversations going on at those sites.

Ideas are everywhere

We all find ourselves in need of fresh ideas, topics, and angles to write about. Whether it’s for a blog, making an article pitch, or trying to figure out how to tackle a broader topic you’re currently stuck with, you have a host of resources online you can take advantage of.

Talk with your friends. Leverage Google. Scan the news regularly. It’s all there, waiting to be used. Remembering just these few suggestions means you’ll never run out of ideas again. You just need to put in a little bit of work to extract those nuggets to turn them into gold.