5 Ways to Find Article Ideas for Blogs and Newsletters

The blank page and blinking cursor are among the most daunting challenges for a blogger or newsletter author. The words, sentences, and paragraphs would flow wonderfully if only you knew what to write about.

For a new content creator, composing the first few email newsletters or blog posts may feel exhilarating. Ideas come easy. But as time goes on, knowing what to write about —what valuable idea or concept to share— becomes a significant challenge.

Topic ideas are so important that having a method for generating new ones is a foundation for any successful content business.

Since 1996, I have written thousands of articles. What follows is a list of how I discover article topics, whether I am writing for a magazine, a blog, or an email newsletter.

No. 1: Experience

Article ideas flow freely from experiences. One of the most productive times in my personal writing journey was when I was working as the director of marketing and ecommerce for a retail chain and writing for Practical Ecommerce, an online journal.

For those ten years, I was able to translate the experience of leading an ecommerce team into weekly articles. If I had been focused on inventory management at work, I wrote about inventory management. When digital advertising was top of mind, I shared pay-per-click strategies.

Writing about my actual work experience also had the wonderful benefit of clarifying my thinking. Often, I would sit down to write about a problem the company was experiencing, only to find that I had composed a solution.

What are you experiencing that can be transformed into a topic idea?

No. 2: A Plan

It can be much more difficult to generate individual topic ideas than it is to develop a content or topic plan.

For example, I know that I want the You, Money, Happiness website to rank in search engines for the concept "email newsletter strategies." Thus, I used SEMrush to identify a potential pillar page idea and several supporting topics. Culling the list of topics SEMrush had suggested, I was left with 37 article ideas.

Over time, I can compose each of these 37 articles, gradually building a topic cluster for the website.

To use this idea, identify a broad topic you want to be known for and make a list of all of the subtopics it includes. Then, follow the plan and write your way through the list.

No. 3: Read and Listen

To quote author Stephen King, "You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it's true. If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he or she wanted to become a writer but 'didn't have time to read,' I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."

While King was specifically speaking about creative writing, reading and listening are among the best ways to identify topic ideas for blogs and newsletters, too.

Try to develop a habit of reading other newsletters and blogs, listening to relevant podcasts, and participating in social media conversations, particularly on Reddit.

One of my recent articles about how AI and bots impact content creation came directly from a Reddit post.

The next time you hear or read something related to your blog or newsletter, take note and use it for an upcoming article.

No. 4: Have Conversations

In 2004, journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about ketchup. It is not a topic he would have probably stumbled upon on his own. The idea came when he was having a conversation about the differences in the mustard and ketchup markets at the time.

Frequently, conversations can spark ideas for article topics. Just last week, a colleague, Derrick, mentioned Hoppy Copy, an AI-driven newsletter tool, as we were discussing newsletter publishing tools.

I was not familiar with it, but after visiting the company's website, I had several article ideas. While —at the time of this writing— I haven't yet decided if I will actually work on these Hoppy Copy posts, I now have several new ideas in my article backlog.

No. 5: History

"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9 ESV).

The saying goes that history has a way of repeating itself.

From the perspective of generating topics, history also has a way of sparking ideas.

I expect this list essay to be the substance of the You, Money, Happiness newsletter on September 24, 2024, so I did a quick search and discovered that F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896.

Fitzgerald was, of course, the author of "The Great Gatsby" and many other novels. Thus, he was a writer, and writing is a topic I cover.

After a few more searches, I discovered that there is a debate about the quality of Fitzgerald's writing and the efficacy of his advice on the topic. Controversy makes for good articles, so I could easily have written about Fitzgerald.

The next time you need a topic, try history.

Keeping a List

My final suggestion is, perhaps, obvious. Keep a list of topic ideas you can turn to in a pinch.