I have found very simple steps to brainstorm content ideas. Let’s say I have a few topics in my mind:

• Content Marketing
• Social Media
• Blogging
• SEO
• PPC

Let’s figure it out. Try with Google Trends

Don’t forget to filter your search. Now you have got an idea about people would like to read. Now let’s move on to Google Blog Search to get an idea about the recent blog posts on specific topic.

Soo where the ideas are coming out. Now you may peep into each post you find interesting & make a list how many time it was shared on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, no  of comments. Thus you would have a clear idea about what to write & what your readers would love to read.

So what other techniques you follow to brainstorm your blogging ideas. Please share your comments below.

These are great ideas to get blog topics with.  I’m going to try trends…I don’t do it all that much.  I usually use the Adwords like Kristi

@souravsaha In addition to the Google AdWords tool and Trends, here are a few things I do to brainstorm blogging ideas - 

Check out analytics to see which posts have received a lot of traffic and if they’re old, you can do an updated version.  You can also use analytics to see what keywords people used to find your site.  
WordTracker has an interesting free tool where you can enter keywords and see what questions have been asked about the keyword/s you entered.  Here’s the link - https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/keyword-questions.
With the new year, a lot of industry blogs have put out their lists of top blog posts of 2012.  I subscribe to several industry blogs so I get them emailed to me but if you don’t subscribe to any or only a few, you can do a search for example “top 50 blog posts of 2012 seo” and get a lot of blogs that did lists like those. I like this method because there are so many ideas and you can have an idea of what kind of traffic/social shares you might receive for a similar but updated post.
Google Alerts is another good way to get blogging ideas.  Set up alerts using your keywords and you’ll get a daily (depending on which box you choose) email with posts others have written.
Using Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Answers, Etc, you can find out what questions people are asking about your specific industry, answer them in a blog post and maybe even post a link for the people that asked the question.
I personally use the SME networking clubs to see what type of questions people are asking and write blog posts around them.  Additionally, I also use several other industry forums as well.   

I’ve added this to my to do list when blogging! With so many clients it’s sometimes hard to be creative on a subject you just wrote on.  Have used Trends for other purposes just didn’t think to use it for blog posts!  Thank you.