There’s no shortage of lists, articles, and blog posts online that aim to help bloggers find new sources of blog topic ideas.  If you’re ideas ever dry up, all you need to do is Google for one these sources for inspiration.  My three favorite sources of blog topics come from things I already do everyday: read blogs, answer questions and makes observations.

Blogs and Comments

Other people’s blogs are great sources of inspiration.  Start by look at the titles, can you adopt it for your own industry? For example, 10 Marketing Predictions for 2012, change that into 10 Fitness Trends for 2012, if you blog about getting fit.  I admit it, that was too easy. But that’s what I wanted to illustrate.  Secondly, read the articles.  Do you agree, disagree, did you learn something? Comment on it.  If you’re going to be leaving a comment anyway, why don’t you just expand it and turn into a post?  You kill two birds with one stone, a new blog post and a comment.  In your comment, it is perfectly ok to notify the article author that you were inspired to write up a full blog post in response.  Be sure to leave a link to your post.

Answer Questions

This has to be one of my favourite ways of getting some ideas down on paper.  I am often asked questions related to marketing, technology, social media and fitness.  When I provide an answer, I actually send myself an email reminding myself to answer this question in the blog post.  I’ve done this a lot on my personal training and fitness blog.  Also, if you spend a lot of time answering questions on sites like LinkedIn Answer, Yahoo Answers and Quora, why not turn your answers into blog posts?  You don’t have to answer questions on there, you can simply browse categories that you’re most knowledgeable about and see the questions people are asking.  Like commenting on blogs, turn questions and your answers into blog posts.

Observe

Look around you.  Do you notice how people use certain products?  Do you notice how people react to different events?  How they interact with others? Turn your observations into blog posts.  For example, if you’re a personal trainer and you notice someone lacking motivation to push through the extra rep, can you write a post on ‘how to get motivated to push through the last rep’?  Of course you can.

The ideas are all around us, all we have to do is be aware of our activities and surroundings; and always be asking, Can I turn this into a blog post?  An answer will almost always be a resounding, YES.