A Guide to Brainstorming Topics for a Blog

Here’s the scenario. You’ve been asked to come up with a list of potential topics for your client’s blog. Easy, right?

But keep in mind all the topics need to be:

• Related to the blog owner’s business or organization

• Interesting enough to hook new readers

• (Sometimes) search engine optimized

• New! Fresh! Different!

On top of that, your list needs to be organized so you can refer back to it and quickly get started on the writing. Contextminds has got your back. By integrating search with a whiteboard and extra tools, Contextminds has everything you need to play around with ideas, find popular topics, visualize their relationships, and keep them all organized for quick reference.

If you’re firing on all cylinders, always full of ideas, keenly aware of every search trend, and have a photographic memory, this guide might not be for you.

For the rest of us, this guide will help in you need to:

• Figure out what topics people care about

• Slay the dreaded “blank screen” monster

• Organize your findings in a way that makes sense to you

• Add notes and reminders so Future You wastes less time remembering your reasoning

• Understand what people are actually searching for that relates to your blog 

Let’s say your client makes software to help people who manage spas. Everything in Contextminds starts with the whiteboard. This lets you organize your ideas in a way that makes sense to you.

The quickest way to get started is to <generate a map from a prompt>. Choose “Concept map” and type in what you’re looking for. In this case, “I want to discover topics of interest to people who manage spa businesses.” 

You’ll get a chance to refine the map before you accept it. Once you accept, you’ll see something like this: 

When you get into the whiteboard, drag items to see all the relationship labels between them. It’s time to check:

• Are these items useful to me?

• Are these relationship labels (the labels on connecting relationship lines) accurate?

Adjust until you’re feeling good about what’s there.

Note: You’re not looking to create a “perfect map”. At this stage you simply want to make sure the most relevant ideas are on your whiteboard.

On your whiteboard, remove anything you think won’t be relevant and add any additional topics you can think of. Drawing a blank? No problem.

Let’s say you want to explore one of the topics on your map, like Wellness Trends. Select that item and take a look at the search tab on the left. Highlight Topics and use the filters to adjust where Contextminds will search for suggestions.

Add any topic suggestions by clicking on the + or just by dragging the suggestion to the whiteboard.

Drag items around on your whiteboard to organize your topic suggestions however you like. You can add them as subtopics within Wellness Trends… 

… or keep them separate and repeat the process to search for more specific subtopics.

And just like that, no more blank screen. But that’s just step one. With different types of searches: keywords, questions, headings, or articles, you can find out exactly what keywords people are searching for. 

Or what kinds of questions you can answer in your posts.

Pro tip: Don’t underestimate the power of searching through questions. Remember you’re trying to hook your readers, and a question is a powerful way to invoke their curiosity. 

Heading suggestions are also a great starting point for brainstorming topics.

And don’t forget to refine your search with filters. Some posts benefit from knowing what’s on Reddit and others are more in the scientific journals category.

And boom! You’ll have a list of relevant, interesting, and fresh topics in a matter of minutes.

Most of us have related ideas while we’re working that need follow up later on, or just to remind us next time we log in. But we don’t want these notes to affect suggestion results. There are two ways to save this information:

1. With a pinned note that’s associated with a particular map item

2. With a stickie note that you can place anywhere on the map

View or edit pinned notes on the right-hand side of the screen, in the Notes panel. Add a stickie note by dragging and dropping it from the toolbar at the bottom of the workspace.