vidIQ is a great tool for helping YouTubers come up with ideas, but can it also double to help with a blog? Actually, yes, but there is a caveat. Not all topics you write about on a blog will translate well to YouTube, and vice-versa.
What I mean by this is that YouTube and blogging often have very different audience types even if you’re producing identical content. The video version of a great blog post may not get traffic at all.
In fact, I see this happen all the time as I often use the blog and the YouTube channel to provide ideas for one another.
How to Use vidIQ for Blog Ideas
I’m assuming you have a vidIQ account. If you don’t, it’s a free app that is extremely helpful to monitor your YouTube channel. If you’re familiar with TubeBuddy, it’s a similar app.
For the examples below, I am using the vidIQ Boost account. It’s a more expensive premium version that lets me monitor all three of my primary YouTube channels. But, you can also just use vidIQ pro, which is about $90 per year.
There are a few different ways you can use vidIQ for blog post ideas.
Generate Ideas
The Generate section of vidIQ is heavily powered by AI. Not only will it provide the title and description, but it will also generate thumbnails. You also have the option for the tool to generate an entire script.
So, how does this work for a blog post? Well, in the outline of the video, you can use those sections as headings while writing. Plus, the tags can give you an idea of keywords to use throughout the piece.
This is one of vidIQ’s functions that I don’t use all that often. I am quite against using generative AI and will never use its text as any part of my content. However, it’s not entirely useless as it can provide a few ideas that I can run with on my own.
You don’t have to just stick with whatever the AI is feeding you, either. The tags and keywords alone are enough to spark all kinds of ideas. Although tags aren’t necessarily keywords, they are useful to see how content relates to one another.
For example, a generated idea about dealing with Google’s algorithm also yielded things like “content strategy” and “digital marketing,” which can be used as ideas for other blog posts.
The Keyword Tool
The keyword tool in vidIQ is geared toward YouTube. However, there are a lot of results that score relatively high on YouTube that would also work well as blog posts.
vidIQ will give you an overview, top keyword opportunities, top search terms for your channel, and rising keyword lists that are ideal for videos. If you use blog posts for video content, which I’ll go over a bit in a moment, then these lists are extremely relevant for content development.
In my experience, I’ve had a few blog posts that received a great deal of attention from both subscribers and Google that were based on the keywords from vidIQ. Of course, a lot of the content is hit or miss. But the tool can do a lot to give you some ideas of what to create next.
It’s not a bad idea to feed those phrases into any one of many keyword tools on the Internet. That way, you know which ones are currently performing well in search.
One of the nice things about this tool is that you’ll see quite a comprehensive list of words that are relevant to each other. It’s not just a list of phrases containing the same word just organized differently.
As an added bonus, you can export the list as a CSV file if you’re like me and love managing content ideas from a spreadsheet.
Outlier Video Inspiration
Outliers in vidIQ are videos that greatly surpass the channel’s average for views. They are also closely relevant to the type of YouTube channel you are building.
This list of existing videos is to help inspire you to make your own versions or perhaps expand what those creators are publishing. It shows how viewers are interested in specific topics.
How well does this translate to writing blog posts? Quite well, actually. After browsing through the list, I’ve seen several outlier videos that are similar to some of the most popular content on this blog.
Now, that doesn’t mean that all of the videos in this list are going to be winners if you write a blog post variant. However, there is a lot of potential for driving traffic if you structure them properly.
In my list of outliers, a very large portion of them are reviews. And I know from experience that reviews are some of the most effective forms of content regardless of the platform.
Daily Ideas
The Daily Ideas section is where the AI throws personalized ideas at you regarding your channel and your audience. So far, the ideas I’ve used on the YouTube channel surpassed average views, but didn’t necessarily rank in the top 10.
Nonetheless, the ideas from vidIQ have merit when writing a blog post. In fact, a lot of them worked exceptionally well on this website in the past. No, they didn’t get as much attention as a review or a tutorial. However, they did outperform a lot of the other posts in terms of 28-day traffic stats.
Of course, there are some that vidIQ ranks relatively low on YouTube despite them working very well on a blog. For instance, one of the ideas I came across at the bottom of the list was referring to a list of the best writing apps. The blog post variant of that particular idea is one of my most popular posts on WriterSanctuary.
That’s what I was talking about earlier; your audiences are slightly different on either medium despite having almost the exact same content. You’ll have to analyze the ideas to make sure your readers are going to enjoy them.
You can get an idea of what people want to read on your site by looking at the views and on-page time in Google Analytics.
The Create Section
If you need topics for the day or to jump on emerging trends, the Create section in vidIQ has a lot of ideas for writing blog posts. Plus, there is a field that you can use to start with an original idea. Just keep in mind that the Create section is also heavy with AI tools.
One of the neat features in this area is the “Answer Your Audience” segment. Using the comment sections of your videos, vidIQ suggests ideas based on the needs of your viewers.
All of the ideas you choose to preview will launch the AI tool for creating titles, thumbnails, and the outline of your video. This can help you structure the blog post in a similar fashion that may improve audience retention. However, the AI-generated images are much to be desired.
I wouldn’t use AI images, but the option is there should you choose. Yet, it’s riddled with extra fingers, people with two right hands, and much more. It’s the typical fun, jumbled mess AI imagery has come to deliver.
Regardless of the infusion of AI, you can get quite a few ideas for blog posts in the Create section of vidIQ.
vidIQ’s AI Coach
The AI Coach is where you use chat to ask questions about the type of content you should be making for your YouTube channel. Using the data vidIQ collects about your niche, your specific audience, and the performance of your past videos, the AI chat can be quite informative when looking for ideas.
The AI Coach is broken up into two specific tools: Basic and Advanced.
The Basic version is where you ask the AI about YouTube or content creation in general. Depending on the type of content you’re considering, or whether you should pivot, this has the potential to help iron out some edges for video development.
The Advanced version is personalized for you about YouTube and your channel. This is the area I use most often as I am interested in developing content that is specific to my particular audience.
In either case, you can spend hours asking the AI questions while getting a ton of ideas for your blog. Unfortunately, you can only go so far in the free version of the tool, but it can still be incredibly helpful.
Viewing Your Competitors
One of vidIQ’s functions is to keep an eye on your competitors and how they are performing. By analyzing what they’re creating, you can get an idea of what content you might want to make next.
While most of these folks are strictly YouTubers, there is still validity in making similar content for your blog.
In the free version of vidIQ, you can track up to three channels as your competitor, which might be enough for most bloggers. But since I pay for the Boost version, I can make quite an extensive list of other writers, blogging experts, and freelancers to help generate ideas.
Out of all of the tools in vidIQ for blog ideas, viewing competitors will probably have the lowest impact. Sure, you can get a few ideas based on what someone else uploaded and then make it better with your own take on the topic. But the above tools are far better for idea generation, in my opinion.
Tracking What Works
When using any tool for blog ideas, it’s always best to track the progress of what works. Perhaps the best and easiest way to do this is through the use of a spreadsheet. That way, you can keep an eye on what ideas work for your blog, whether they come from vidIQ or Google Adwords.
You can be as basic or as elaborate as you’d like, but the idea is to monitor things like word count, traffic, and search position over a six-month period.
I know, not a lot of folks think spreadsheets are the sexiest part of blogging. But I can’t tell you how often I’ve been able to make some winning decisions and strategies thanks to setting up spreadsheets for monitoring progress.
I’ll keep track of keywords and ideas from various sources, search volume for keyphrases, impressions, clicks, and search position for a lot of what I write for all of my blogs.
You can create your own any way that you see fit, but keeping an eye on the source of your ideas will help you determine whether it is worth your time.
In my experience with WriterSanctuary, using vidIQ for blog ideas has been greatly beneficial. As I said earlier, a lot of what the tool suggested has performed relatively well compared to other content.
Plus, vidIQ suggested reviews on writing apps that I didn’t even know existed.
Using Blog Posts as Video Scripts
Lately, I’ve been using blog posts as video scripts as a way to help me save time. Essentially, I’m creating two pieces of content for the price of one. In this case, using vidIQ’s ideas has been extremely useful for maintaining the channel and the blog simultaneously.
It doesn’t have to be a complete one-to-one recording, but blog posts can easily help you outline your next video. This is called “repurposing your content,” and a lot of YouTubers do it.
The steps would work something like this:
- Get an idea from vidIQ for a blog post.
- Flesh out the blog post as well as you can, complete with keywords and research.
- Once the post is published, use the blog post as a script for the video version. You may even be able to use the same screenshots if you have them.
This helps in a number of ways, especially when it comes to search engine optimization. Google will show segments of a video that are relevant to someone’s search. If your video is set up similarly to a blog with identifiable sections, you could see a lot of your YouTube’s external video views coming from Google.
This contributes to views as well as watch time, counting toward the YouTube monetization requirements.
That’s the beauty of using a blog as a script for your videos. If you have it structured well with breakpoints for “video chapters” on YouTube, there’s a good chance Google will use video segments, which pushes your content out even further.
Where Do Your Blogging Ideas Come From?
Blog ideas can come from a large number of sources. At the end of the day, the only thing that truly matters is where you get your inspiration. As long as something can spark some creativity or pique your interest, you can create some great content.
vidIQ is just one of those tools that was intended for YouTube but I’ve found another use in terms of blog post ideas.
Does this mean you have to use vidIQ to create great content? Absolutely not. It’s merely one of many tools that you can have in your box for free.
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