Blogging can be very profitable these days. As a result, everyone wants to have a blog.

In fact, recent data from Hubspot has shown that blogging can be more effective than Superbowl ads.

In other words, whether you are a business that wants to grow your revenue or an individual that wants to earn some side income, blogging can be what you need.

There are currently around 200 million blogs in the world today, and millions added monthly, a large percentage of which are abandoned a few months after they are started.

While there are many reasons why people stop blogging, one major reason is due to lack of ideas.

How can you keep blogging if you don’t have ideas for content that will be published on your blog?

Here are 5 ways and tools to get content ideas for your blog:

1. Use Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! Answers, in my own opinion, is one the best tools that can help you find content ideas for your blog.

As a freelance writer, I write for clients in various niches. Most of the times, I know nothing about a particular client’s niche, yet I’m able to write expertly on the subject as if I’ve been writing in that niche for years.

This is due to using Yahoo! Answers for my research.

Yahoo! Answers is also very useful because it has been in existence for years now, so not only will you get quality ideas on what to write but you’ll also be able to track how the ideas have evolved over the years.

Yahoo! Answers is also very huge, so no matter what topic you want to write about or what angle you want to take, you’ll find ideas and exact words people use when trying to find out more about the topic.

2. Use Quora

Quora is another powerful tool that you can use to find content ideas.

Even though Quora is a new tool, it’s growing exponentially lately and is becoming increasingly useful.

In fact, for almost every question that is asked on Quora you’ll most likely find a quality, in-depth answer that can further inspire your blog post.

Quora is very sophisticated for getting blog post ideas, and by using the search box provided on the Quora site you’ll be able to find questions, posts and ideas for almost any keyword.

3. Technorati

Technorati is another powerful tool I use to generate content ideas.

Technorati has a database of over 1 million blogs, in various niches.

Some of these blogs are updated every day and most of them are updated at least once a week. By searching for specific keywords on what you want to write about with Technorati, you’ll get a list of blogs and articles related to that keyword.

You can then read those articles for ideas on what to write. Besides that, when you start seeing a lot of things in common amongst all the articles listed, you’ll get a clear idea of what most people want and how to give it to them.

4. Any Social Media Site

Social media sites are very powerful content idea generation tools, but very few people pay attention to them.

Do you know that over 340 million Tweets are posted on Twitter every single day?

The number of Facebook status updates made every day is even more than that.

Now, while the majority of Twitter users are not bloggers or content curators there are quite of lot of them on Twitter. Same goes for Facebook and other major social media site.

Another great thing about social media sites is that updates usually contain recent information, so if you want blog post ideas to connect with your audience, leveraging the power of any major social media site will give you an advantage.

It’s as simple as using the search box provided by each social media site and searching for keywords that interest you; most of the ideas will be unusable, but by the time you’ve gone through majority of the ideas you see you’ll have a solid idea of what to write.

5. Top Blogs in Your Niche

Perhaps this is the most effective way to find content ideas.

Since you’re a blogger, what better way is there to know what works than from other bloggers…especially a more successful blogger?

When you take a look at the most successful blogs in your niche, there’s every probability they all have a section of their sidebar that shows their most popular posts.

You can get content ideas not only by analyzing these popular posts to get ideas to help you write your own popular posts, but you can also get actual ideas and keywords people use in your field by observing the comments section of these blog.

Depending on the size of the blog and how many comments it gets, there’ll be at least a dozen questions in those comments. In most cases, some of these questions will be similar. Now, you have an idea for what to write about.

You can then take main keywords you got from these blogs and then use Yahoo! Answers or Quora to help you find out more about those keywords and refine them.

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