How to find content ideas for your blog?

What are some ways to find and qualify a list of ideas to write about on your blog?

Assuming you're starting from scratch, here are some methods I use when brainstorming an initial list of post ideas:

1) What are all the topics related to the business? A business card printing company might also consider personal branding, networking, office culture or freelancing, design, professional events, typography, LinkedIn profiles, job-hunting, or sales relevant to their business, as well as business cards themselves.

2) What keywords are people searching for? Google's keyword tool, any Google auto-complete scraper, and a keyword-in-questions tool can help you find a bunch of related terms and phrases to generate ideas from. Google's keyword tool, which will also tell you how many times per month users search for each keyword, will help you qualify post topics as well.

3) Who, what, when, where, why, and how? Using the five Ws with your topics list is a good way to generate a bunch of ideas. Who uses business cards (what posts would interest each audience)? What do business cards have to do with personal branding? When have business cards made a big impact? Where can you find examples of good LinkedIn profiles? Why should you or shouldn't you list your phone number on your business card? How can you get a photo of yourself on your business card and have it not look like crap?

4) What are all the things we're learning? What are we producing that can be turned into content? Your company itself should be a rich source of blog ideas. Photos of the process, customer results, research you've done, etc. Your customers don't care a ton about you, but they are often interested in how the sausage is made if they can learn something useful from it too. Often when you're building a tool for a market, it's necessary to become an expert in that market -- write posts that showcase some of that expertise as you gain it.

5) Where can we find news, questions, and commentary related to our product? Google alerts, RSS feeds for any industry blogs, and twitter saved searches are some of my favorite tools for providing on-going inspiration for new posts.

Some ideas to use when you're facing a writers block for your niche:

• Run a contest
• Review a book or product
• Write a comprehensive tutorial
• Interview an influencer
• Create an infographic and write about it
• Criticize a service or a person (controversy sells)
• Share a personal secret (which relates to your niche)
• Share your goals publicly
• List of the top 10 posts on other blogs in your niche this week
• Write a rebuttal to some recent news
• List of your favorite bloggers
• Invite readers to submit guest posts
• List of best comments on your blog
• Share your blog's metrics (traffic and revenue)
• Bust a myth
• Write about a success and failure you had
• Start a poll
• Publish some little known facts
• Analyze an infographic someone else has made in your niche
• "Best of" post (list of your most popular posts)