One Simple Trick to Find a Ton of Blogging Ideas

… and a load of new ways to showcase your experience and expertise

It you want to blog regularly, whether on Medium or elsewhere, it can feel difficult to find new twists on the same subjects. Luckily, there’s an easy way to find ideas, right there at your phone-addicted fingertips. (For all you skimmers — I know you’re out there, I’m one of you sometimes too! — I’ve summarised it at the bottom of this article.)

Head to Reddit (No, you don’t even have to join to do this!)

I started exploring Reddit after someone started a thread to share our Medium posts there and shared it in one of the Facebook groups, and from time to time I flip idly through the app to see if there’s anywhere I could post my articles, where they’d be genuinely of interest and help someone.

For a long time, thanks mainly to a guy on my MFA program who was the first person to ever mention Reddit in my vicinity, I assumed it was mainly a place for pick-up artists and toxic masculinity. It turns out that’s not the case at all!

(I write mainly about books, reading, and language learning, so those along with West Wing themed stuff, are the sub-Reddits I follow. Sub-Reddits are, in simple terms, a bit like Facebook groups. You join them and then jump into discussion threads.)

I was looking for somewhere to post a link to my article on How to Make Tea, the Proper British Way, when I came across this.

There are already some very thorough answers to the tea question here, so I didn’t bother leaving my link. But I did notice something else: the r/IWantToLearn at the top. That means there’s an entire sub-Reddit where people ask how to learn things. At the time of writing this, there are more than 600,000 members of that sub-Reddit, so that makes for a LOT of daily posts.

Take the first ten questions you see on r/IWantToLearn

You can toggle to “hot”, “new”, or “top”, and it may not matter which you choose. “Hot” and “top” will have questions lots of people are interested in, so that may be your way into getting lots of eyes on your blog. But “new” might offer up some more niche questions — and that, too, can help with the eyeballs, especially if there’s not much competition on Google (or Medium!) for similar articles.

Any cursory glance of the r/IWantToLearn sub-Reddit will give you a wide variety of things people want to learn.

Ask yourself this: how can I apply my expertise and experience to answer these questions?

Now, I don’t know anything about heraldry — I’d be hard pressed to tell you what it even is — and making electronic music on my phone is not in my area of expertise either, but with a bit of research, I bet I could write something passable, and you could too.

But that’s not really where my interests lie, and it’s not what my Medium followers come to my feed for, either. Plus, it’s hard work to learn a whole new set of knowledge from scratch well enough to write about it, especially bearing in mind that you have to take care not to plagiarise from the websites you’re using for research.

I mainly write about books, reading, writing, and language learning — as well as some personal essays.

So, on the basis of this random thread of questions pictured above, I could, using my experience and expertise, write the following:

How to be confident and assertive?

• a researched piece on why confidence is important, mixed in with some of its benefits I’ve noticed in my life
• a list of the kinds of things that have helped me gain confidence
• a personal essay on my experience of how and when I feel confident
• a personal essay on why depression is so hard, from the angle of its impact on confidence and the trickle-down effect on other things in life
• a personal essay on how knowing my identity in God helps me be more confident

I want to learn how to be more well rounded and gain more skills/interests/anything:

• how reading helps you be more well-rounded
• a suggestion of skills/interests/anything you could learn to be more well-rounded — including writing, reading, and language learning
• a piece on how language learning helps you be more well-rounded and how to start down that route if you are interested (okay, I’ve probably already written this one…)

I want to learn how to improve my vocabulary

• a piece on how reading can help with improving vocabulary, and how, practically, you can make this work for you
• a piece on improving your vocabulary in a foreign language

I want to learn to read effectively

• an article asking what it means to read effectively
• a personal essay musing on what I consider “successful” reading
• an article that directly answers the question, since this is my wheelhouse!

Go ahead, try it!

1. Find the sub-Reddit r/IWantToLearn

2. Take the first ten posts you see

3. Brainstorm each question, using this benchmark: “How can I apply my experience and/or expertise to answer this, or a slightly tweaked version of this?”

I bet you’ll have loads of new ideas in just minutes!