The most effective way to gain more followers and generate traffic for your blog is to keep it up-to-date. If you don’t post content on a regular basis, your blog may hibernate and cause you to lose precious followers. So before you start a blog, make sure that you are in a position to post content regularly. Even if you are able to blog frequently, it is sometimes difficult to come up with new content ideas. Here are a few pointers on how to search for good content ideas for your blog.

• Social Media

On social media you will find people tweeting or posting interesting information all the time. Twitter has become the hotspot for new content ideas, as people constantly tweet about the latest news. So pick an interesting theme and search for relevant tweets on Twitter using hashtags. You will find a host of results to choose from. Be sure to pick something new as old news never appeals to readers. You can also use Topsy search to find real time tweets on the theme you have identified.

• Top 5 or Top 10 lists

Lists are an easy way to attract the attention of your readers. You benefit from writing “top 5” or “top 10” posts in two ways – it interests readers as well as keeps your blog alive. You can also try listing top 10 websites in selected categories. You can request for a mention of your site on these 10 sites, if they ever made a list of their own, which will benefit you.

• Be open to suggestions from readers

You can post a poll or contest asking your readers to suggest ideas for your website. This technique not only gives you content ideas, but also helps you evaluate the readership of your blog. You can make use of social media here and post the contest on your Facebook wall or on your LinkedIn page.

• Categories

If your blog is focused on a particular niche, ensure that you write posts on different categories of the same niche. This is a blogging formula used by many bloggers today. If you have exhausted ideas in one category you can write a post on another.

• Guest authors

Have a section of your posts written by guest bloggers. You can seek the help of guest bloggers by incorporating a ‘submit a post’ or ‘write for us’ button. This helps at times when you are unable to come up with topics to write posts on or when you don’t have the time to write.

Following the above can help you with finding content ideas for your blog. You can use keyword tools to see what keyword works really well in your niche and write posts based on them so as to optimize your content for search engines. Remember that ‘content is king’ and that it’s never going to change. So keep posting quality articles and you’ll have a loyal following soon enough.