Getting ideas and topics for your technical blog might be a headache sometimes if you run out of them. It also depends upon the type of technical blog you have. I focus on Information Technology and Computer Science related blogs.
I have written more than 200 technical blogs on my website JD Bots and still I have more ideas to write on even if it is a simple and short blog. I write mostly on How to? type of blogs with step by step guide to follow.
Below are 8 different places I get ideas and topics for my technical blog. We will go into detail about each of them.
Question Hub by Google
This is the best place I get ideas and topics for my technical blog. You get to search questions by using keywords. You can also follow these keywords if any new questions are added later in the future. Save these questions and answer them later.
Question Hub allows creators to create richer content by answering questions that don’t have answers on the web today.
Google collects questions that don’t have good answers on the web. They then show these questions to bloggers, writers, and content creators, like you. You can create content to answer these questions, and track its performance.
To use Question Hub, you will have to verify your web property (Your Domain) from Google Search Console. You can only submit content from the verified domains.
Go to Question Hub. If you need help in signing up or using the portal, do let me know in the comments down below. I will create a separate blog on this.
Google Search Console
This place you might already be knowing it. You get to see your google search engine performance here. Many don’t know that this is another best place to analyze your existing blogs on google search and get new ideas.
Open your Google Search Console and click on the Performance tab. Scroll down to find the queries. This tells you that how your existing blogs are performing with these queries. Sort on clicks the opposite way that shows 0 clicks on top. The queries you find there can be a new topic/idea for your next technical blog.
Sort on Impressions as well having minimum impressions on top that might get you a completely new topic. With the performance queries, you can also modify your existing blog if it is not performing better.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Similar to Google Search Console, even Webmaster tools shows you the search engine performance data. In this case, it is Bing search engine.
Log in to Webmaster tools and click on the Search Performance tab. Scroll down to find the Keywords. Again sort on Clicks the other way to get 0 clicks on the top. The keywords you find there can be your next technical blog.
Online Community Forums
The next place where you get ideas is from Online Community Forums. This is the place where developers ask questions and get the response from other developers. Getting a new Idea or topic is very easy here. There will be so many unanswered questions available.
Pick up any question, answer it on your technical blog. If online forums allow giving links to your blog, mention it there in the resolution. Stackoverflow is one of the best places to get the questions. But they have very strict policies on answering questions with links on their platform.
Following are some online community forums along with their technology-specific topics. I will only mention the forums that I use.
| Technology | Community Forum | Links |
|---|---|---|
| Any | Stack Overflow | Link |
| Power Platform and Dynamics 365 | Power Platform | Link |
| UiPath | UiPath Forum | Link |
Apart from these, I have created my own community forum on my website. I do get a few questions and I try to answer those by creating a blog.
YouTube Comments
If you have a YouTube channel where you create technical content, then this is another best place to get ideas and topics for your technical blog. People watch videos and post comments if they have any queries. Simply answer those comments by creating blog content and providing the link to your blog in the comment response.
If you do not have a YouTube channel, don’t worry. You can find comments below your favorite technical videos on YouTube. Answer them by creating blog content and reply to the user with the link to your blog. Remember, some of the content creators block the links in their comments. Still, you can give a response.
I have a YouTube channel where I get lot of queries on Chatbots and RPA. I answer them by writing a blog and giving a link in the reply.
Contact Form
If you have put a contact form on your website, you might already be getting many questions and queries. Answer those queries by writing blog content.
You can also provide your email address so that queries can be sent over the email and all the conversations happen in the email chain.
If you have not put a contact form or email (business email) on your website, I highly recommend you do it because you never know when an opportunity bangs on your door.
Apart from the contact form and email address, another way your readers contact you is through a chat widget. I have added a Facebook chat widget where I get a lot of queries.
Personal Projects
In all the above ways, you find the ideas and topics from other people. Here you do not do it that way. You brainstorm ideas by yourself and come up with use cases for your projects.
Initially, you might not get enough traffic on ideas for personal projects but as time passes, you will get a lot of traffic and your idea will be a big hit.
I have created a lot of personal projects and write blog series on them. For better results, the ideas or topics you get should be yours and not copied from anywhere else. References and modifications can be done. Also, the use case you pick should be made generic so that your project can be extended and other developers can build on top of it.
Always keep your technical blogs very simple and understandable to any person even if he/she is non-technical or trying to learn something new. For example, I write in the blog to open a command prompt window. Many newbies would not know, where the command prompt is. So make it simple - Go to Start -> Type/Search Command Prompt. Make sure to add images for readers’ reference.
Self Learning
This is part of personal projects. Projects can only be created if you have constant learning. You learn the concept and try to apply them to your projects. The more is the learning, the more ideas or topics you get for your technical blogs.
If you are not applying the learned concepts to your projects, then you can also write blogs on these concepts explaining them in your own words.
Conclusion
We have covered the 8 different ways to get ideas and topics for your next technical blog. If you find any other ways, do let me know in the comments down below for my knowledge. Out of the above list, my favorite is Self Learning and personal projects. What is yours?