How to generate 50 blog title ideas on a 1 hour flight

You’re on a one hour flight. Maybe you’re going from Cairns to Townsville, Sydney to Canberra, Melbourne to Albury or Brainerd to Coffs Harbour. It’s a pretty short flight, but it’s a great opportunity to be productive. While you might not be able to produce good content within the short time frame, it does give you the chance to brainstorm content ideas.

Grab a pen and notepad, or an iPad if you prefer, and start thinking about the following things:

What are you passionate about?

It’s definitely easier to produce content that you’re passionate about, rather than having to research a topic you couldn’t care less about. Say you’re passionate about blogging. What do people need to know about blogging? How to start a blog? What website to use? How many blog posts to produce? There’s three different angles already, and it’s just the one topic.

Can you make it personal?

People love reading about other people’s experiences. Producing a blog about your own experiences will make you more relatable to your audience. So, think about your own experience and your work life. “How to break into the content creation industry?” “Why should you hire a copywriter?” “The benefits of producing your own content versus outsourcing”. “Lessons I learnt while running a blog”. Once you break down each step of your career and work life, it creates endless blog ideas.

What mistakes do people make?

People want to avoid making mistakes in the workplace, and as a result they will use search engines to find out ways to avoid the mistake in the first place. “How can you avoid writer's block?” “How to avoid losing readers?” “How to avoid burnout?”

Negative and positive content

You can easily double the amount of blog title ideas when you think about the opposite of what you’re writing about. Writing about “How to improve your WordPress website?” Think about the negative title: “What NOT to do to your WordPress website.” This is an easy way to cover the same topic, but write two different angles that people will be wanting to find answers for.

Think outside of the box

Target a new audience

Every blog post you write isn’t going to be for the same audience, and people will quickly get bored reading about the same audience all the time. An easy way to come up with more topics is change who you’re writing about. Add a name into the title of your post. “What every graduate should know about content marketing” “What CMOs get wrong with content marketing.” They share the same topic - content marketing - but will be clearly targeted at two different audiences.

Think about the time frame

Including a time frame within the title is a great way to stick to the same topic while producing multiple blog posts. Consider something such as “the biggest changes in blogging in 2016” “the most influential bloggers of 2016” “new bloggers worth checking out this month.”

How do you get the job done?

What helps you produce a good blog post? What tools should other people know about? “Top 10 tools to help produce good content.” “Why you should use WordPress for your blog.” “WordPress vs Drupal - which is better for my blog?”

What is in the news?

Writing about anything current and newsworthy is a sure way to gain more hits. Check out a few news websites and see if there is anything relevant to your industry. Mobile web browsing has overtaken desktop. “Why it’s important to make sure your website is mobile friendly.” Facebook announced a huge increase in profit. “Why Facebook is important for your marketing strategy.” If you’re able to produce content quickly, it will be relevant and fresh.

Use online tools to generate ideas

Maybe you find it hard to come up with ideas off the top of your head. Fortunately, there are tons of tools that will help you complete this task:

• Portent's Content Idea Generator: simply enter the subject you’re writing about, and it will generate the blog title for you, and give you the reasonings behind why those words were chosen.
• Google’s Keyword Planner: this is great if you’re struggling with content development. Simply type in a keyword and see what other related suggestions come up. It will also show you how many people are searching for that keyword and the level of competition. This way you won’t produce irrelevant content or the same content as everyone else.
• Quora: this question and answer site will easily give you insight into the problem of your target audience. If there’s enough people going online to ask and find the answers to a problem, you know there will be an audience for your blog post.    
• Google Trends: this does what the name suggests - shows currently trending topics.
• HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator: simply type in the terms you want to write about, and HubSpot will come up with a week’s worth of relevant blog posts. Typing in “blogging” “content” and “management” produced “10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Blogging” “10 Quick Tips About Content” “14 Common Misconceptions About Management” “How To Solve The Biggest Problems With Blogging” and “What Will Content Be Like in 100 Years?”
• Buzzsumo: this will allow you to find top content in your industry.
• Social Mention: allows you to listen in on social media conversations. This will make it easier for you to know what your target market is interested in.
• Stumbleupon: will help you to “stumble” upon inspiration.
• Build Your Own Blog: this website has a blog post ideas generator. You don’t even have to type in anything, the tool will just generate generic topics you can modify. Topics included “I wanted to recommend you read/watch X because” “I couldn’t believe it when…” and “why I’m not a fan of…”.

Thinking about these simple questions, or doing a bit of research using online tools, will help you to generate interesting and relevant blog ideas. By the time you land in your destination, these questions will have helped you to produce 50 blog titles, and only in the space of one hour.