How Online Forums & Discussion Boards Can Help You Write Your Blogs

Author: Kaitlyn Wilcoxson Category: B2B, B2C, Marketing, Social Media & Digital Date: July 7, 2016

Have you ever struggled with coming up with a topic or topics for your upcoming blog posts? We all have. So, I don’t even need you to answer that question.

The first thing you should ask yourself is “why am I writing a blog in the first place?”

If you’re a business blog writer, then you are probably writing to reinforce your expertise in the industry, provide deeper insight into your company, report on industry or company news, or reinforce your value propositions. There are probably other reasons why you are writing a blog, but these are some of the more popular reasons.

Okay, so let’s say that you want to reinforce your expertise in the industry. One thing to remember is that if you’re trying to show off your expertise, you’ll want to answer the tough questions that people can’t find answers to. Or, questions that people didn’t even know they had.

Where do people turn to ask their questions?

The Internet. Oh…discussion boards and forums, like Quora.

So, maybe we should be scouring Quora, Reddit, and some other discussion board type websites to see what kind of questions people are asking.

On Quora, users can simply ask the world a question and receive responses from anyone in the community who wants to answer them.  As a blog writer, you can simply go to the website, www.quora.com, and type a topic in the search bar. Let’s say that you are a criminal defense lawyer from Alabama and you want to know whether people understand what to do when they receive a traffic ticket. You can type in the search bar, “traffic ticket in Alabama” and see what pops up. Now, this might not be the greatest example, but some questions people are asking include “Is it illegal to drive a car with your shoes off?” “What is it like to live in Alabama?” and “What is the grace period for an expired California driver’s license?” Okay, no one is wondering what to do when they get a traffic ticket in Alabama. So, let’s see if there’s a different topic to write about that someone is asking about.

This is just one example of how you can come up with a blog topic for you to write about.

Another great example of a website that might give you some great content inspiration is Reddit. If you don’t know, Reddit is like a social networking community that is broken down into a number of niches, and sub-niches, and sub-sub-niches and so on and so forth. Give it a whirl: www.reddit.com.

What do people do at Reddit.com and how will it help inspire a blog post? Well, not only do people post questions here similar to Quora, they also post photos, videos, infographics, and other content that they just want to share with the world. This usually sparks debate, conversation and more questions. You can search for “hot” topics, “new” topics, “controversial” topics, or you can search for topics of your choice. From here, you can browse what people are discussing and decide whether a topic is worth commenting on by writing a blog post. If it’s a trending or hot topic, then you might consider it due to the overwhelming popularity and search for this topic.

We hope that these two places, including dozens of other discussion boards and online forums (even LinkedIn’s groups within your industry) will help spark some ideas for future blog topics. Let us know if you get stuck!