“If you want to continually grow your blog, you need to learn to blog on a consistent basis.” –Neil Patel

If you’re ever in a jam trying to figure out what to write your next blog post about and come up with fresh new ideas that will engage your audience, this is a great method that works for me and is largely based off of the method that blogger Neil Patel has talked about in “How I Write 8 Blog Posts a Week While Running 2 Companies.”

This post in also available in handy video form:

“I’ve been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We’d be writing blog entries like, ‘The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.” –Neil Gaiman

Here’s step-by-step how to come up with new ideas:

1. Load my example spreadsheet and copy it to your hard drive so that you can make it your own and use it in the future.
2. In order to know what posts to riff a great approach is to understand the blog posts that are getting the most shares from your competitors, I have this data populated in the “Raw Data” tab of my spreadsheet but you can pull your own data into your own spreadsheet…
3. Goto quicksprout.com and insert your competitors url to find out what their most popular posts are about so that you can write similar blog posts with your own spin
4. Once the analysis is done, click “Social Media Analysis” and scroll down to your results
5. You can sort by social media platform and copy and paste the data over to your document one column at a time
6. Now that you have the data loaded, parse out the posts that you don’t want based on how many shares that the posts have received
7. Copy and paste the URLs for the blogs that you’ll be riffing on into URL column in the “Boiled Down” tab
8. Manually go to each URL and copy and paste the blog title into your spreadsheet
9. Figure out how to twist the idea of the other blog to fit your needs (ie: my blog is focused on mobile applications better so I twisted “How to create great content that drives traffic” to “How to create great content that drives application signups”)
10. Be creative and tailor these successful blog posts to fit your needs and fill them into the “Your blog idea” column
11. Using this tool, you can dig into your competitors blogging results and blog about subjects that are proven to be successful on social media to help drive audience engagement and increase your followers!

This method has worked for me in helping to find relevant inspiration on what to write my next blog post about and has without fail, helped me to gain traction and increase audience engagement with my followers.

About The Author

Alex Berman is the founder and chief content creator of X27 Marketing. He is passionate about promoting efficient B2B lead generation channels and executing on data-driven strategies for his clients.