Cool tool: HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator

For many who blog, coming up with topics to write about is often the hardest when you’re first starting out. It takes a while to know what people respond it — and to then fall into an idea-generating rhythm.

Later, when you’ve been blogging for a couple of years, you might be stumped again, wondering if you’ve covered everything relevant already.

If you’ve spent more time than you’d like wondering what to write about recently, you will welcome the Blog Topic Generator tool from HubSpot.

It is incredibly easy to use.

All you need are 3 words

Simply type three words you want to blog about — preferably nouns — into the form, select “give me blog topics,” and see what happens.

Naturally, the software isn’t perfect and you might have to tweak the resulting topics a bit, but geez, on some days it sure beats thinking!

I gave it a try, using these words:

1. blog
2. topic
3. ideas

and here’s what I got:

The words I selected for my test were weak (if not dumb), so the results aren’t as specific as they need to be. That’s my fault. Even so, I can still do a lot with this list.

Here’s how I might adjust those topics so they work for me:

• 5 tools everyone in the book marketing industry should be using
• 10 things your competitors can teach you about book marketing
• 10 quick tips for book marketing
• The history of book marketing
• 14 common misconceptions about book marketing

Productive, right?

Test #2 — better!

This first test gave me an idea of how the software works, which helped me do a better job with my second test. For that one, I entered my three favorite topics:

1. book marketing
2. book promotion
3. book publicity

The results are pretty cool:

Would I have ever paired Miley Cyrus with book publicity? Probably not — but I see the potential in “Miley Cyrus and book publicity: 10 surprising things they have in common” and might just give it some thought.

The lists generated by this cool tool can be used for newsletter and magazine articles, or for free downloads you offer subscribers to your e-mail list, too.

The potential is impressive, so give it a try and tell us what you think in the comments here. Do you have other tools or strategies for generating blog topics? Please share them here.