4 Simple Ideas to Curate Content for Blog Posts

Are you starting a blog for the first time and looking for ideas on how to create content for blog posts? I recently wrote two posts about starting a blog in 2021 and my method for writing blog posts.

On the second post, someone made a great comment asking for more ideas on how to create content for your blog. While I am no expert with my baby blog here, I have learned some strategies to create content and build ideas for blog posts. Since this blog is about learning, sharing, and growing together, then of course I will share what I’m learning along the way.

I read a lot of other blogs and watch YouTube channels to help build my knowledge of starting a blog. From what I’ve gathered, it takes 6 months to a year to start seeing profits from a blog. And even then, it’s highly dependent on the content you create, the audience you’ve grown, and the quality you provide. One of the more informative channels that I follow is Income School. They have a course you can pay for, but the videos include the majority of the content and strategies for free if you follow them.

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I hope to add more value as I continue to learn, but for now I’ll share 4 ideas to curate content for blog posts:

Personal experience

This is probably the fastest and easiest way to generate content for your blog. As you think about things you’d like to write about, draw on your own experiences. For example, I do regular goal planning throughout the year and I shared my process in a Summer 2021 goal planning post. Another example I shared was my experience preparing for and running a half marathon.

Start with making a list of things that interest you and see if you want to write about any of those topics. Pick the one you have the most to say about and start writing. Now, you may prefer to write one blog post at a time in its entirety or you may choose my method of just tracking ideas and thoughts as they come to me.

Trending topics

Choose to write about trending topics on social media or in the news. I subscribe to a number of bigger blogs such as Medium and PCMag. It allows me to see which type of content is getting a lot of likes or mentions. Additionally, because I write a lot of productivity posts, I follow people on Twitter and LinkedIn to find out what topics are interesting to them.

If you are more advanced, you can use keywords that are popular in searches or invest in technology that helps you identify what those are. I am not at that level yet, but I hope to be in the next 6 months. From Income School, I learned that it takes about 8 months for most blog posts to mature and reach their maximum audience. I just started this blog in February 2021 and really started to ramp up my content in April 2021.

Interesting things I read about or listen to

I spend a fair amount of time consuming content. I love to read and listen to podcasts or watch YouTube channels. Whenever I do this, I am constantly learning new things and gathering new ideas. Many times, I send myself an email with notes on what I read or watched because email is like my ongoing to do list and record keeping space.

I have several blog posts in draft mode right now reviewing books I’ve read to share my overall thoughts. In my conversations with friends, I make notes of the things they are interested in and what they are also reading and watching.

Yes, it’s my circle which could result in an echo chamber of sorts, but I love to hear their viewpoints on different topics and it informs me of the things they are interested in as well. The goal planning post and YouTube video was based on personal experience, but also a conversation with a friend on something that could help her with planning, but all helps me come up with content for blog posts.

My blog post on ways to say no was also a result of a conversation with a friend and some coaching to help her get the message across as she intended. Additionally, I’m currently editing a YouTube video on this topic so I can repurpose content from by blog and YouTube to get the message out to a wider audience.

Monitoring posts that do well

I initially started with the WordPress premium account, but I recently invested in the WordPress business account, which comes with a lot more optimization tools to see how blog posts are doing. One thing I am monitoring is which posts are getting more views and more likes. That tells me that those topics are popular and people want to see more information about that.

Another interesting feature of the business account is that I have a headline analyzer function. This helps me to create eye-catching headlines that have a better chance of eventually be picked up by Google (which takes time). For example, this headline has a score of 72 and a good score is between 40 and 60. I can write a follow up blog post in 6-8 months to update on how well this particularly post did.

What I plan to do is improve the posts that do well over time by adding more information to them or expanding even further. I watch the likes come in on different posts. What I’ve found is that I have a few loyal subscribers who like most of my posts and then some posts on time management and communication or email topics that seem to be doing well in the WordPress reader world.

However, one thing to note is that people can view your blog on the WordPress Reader, but not actually count as a view because they’re not on your page. So I encourage you to click directly on the blog and check out some other posts when you’re coming in from the WordPress Reader.

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I hope this advice for developing content for blog posts was helpful and I look forward to sharing more with you as I continue on this blogging journey!