Blogging tips

Two Great New Ways To Get Ideas for Articles

Hint: you don’t need to rely on your own ideas

We all need good ideas for articles, and at times, it feels like the well runs dry. You must have already covered everything you know about (and a few things that you don’t).

I was scrolling through my Twitter home feed recently, and I came across several questions and polls. It seems that people just love responding to them, even when the questions are super-simple and basic. Or perhaps — especially when that’s the case!

For example:

• Do you like or dislike editing?
• Are you a plotter or a pantser?
• Can anyone think of words to describe an evil person?
• Male authors, what’s your fascination with making women characters 5'6" and 115 pounds?
• Can you speak another language?
• Everyone has a story. What’s yours?
• 100 years ago was the roaring 20s. What’s this 20s shaping up to be?

People engage with these sort of questions! Some of the tweets above have fifty or a hundred likes. They are easy to answer, and folks are probably curious to compare their answers with other people.

If readers will click, that’s half the battle.

Now, all you need to do is note down the questions that you see. Your next article title is a variation on that question, and your Medium story is your response!

What’s more, next time you see the question on Twitter, you have the perfect opportunity to share your own article in a way that’s genuinely helpful, not just ‘link bombing’.

My second suggestion is to mine the highlights and comments on your own articles. There was something about these points that people really responded to. Why not give them more of the same?

For example, in an article about Elon Musk buying Twitter, I mentioned research that has suggested that women often don’t speak their mind on the platform. It was an early highlight:

Unsurprisingly, that caught some readers’ attention. It wasn’t the main point of my article, but on reflection, I decided that it deserved an article of its own:

Overall, we can rely a bit too much on coming up with our own ideas for a story.

The people we connect with are already telling us what they want to read.

Thanks for reading! Here’s a shoutout to Emily Forman for her great article about being added as a Reciprocal writer, to Carmellita for smart suggestions about boosting discussions on your articles, and to 🌈LIFE LESSON for this great piece about staying positive.

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