A blog is a powerful and often underrated marketing tool for your business. While Facebook posts lean toward the visual and Twitter content is limited to 140 characters a pop, blog posts are an ideal way to provide useful information to your regular customers. Additionally, when they’re written with good SEO keywords in mind, regular blog posts can drive potential new customers to your site.
Of course, for a blog to be effective, it needs to updated frequently, maybe even every day. And this means content — lots of content! How do you come up with so many fresh, interesting, and click-worthy ideas for your blog? Here are five tips to help you generate blog topics.
- Check your stats and go from there. Which of your blog posts have been most popular? Google Analytics can tell you what’s getting clicks and what isn’t. That information can steer you in the right direction and help you narrow your focus as you try to come up with ideas for future posts.
- Start by brainstorming bad ideas. This in and of itself may sound like a bad idea, but hold on: there’s more to it. Asking for bad ideas gets rid of the tension in a meeting; no one is afraid that his or her idea will sound bad because — surprise! — it’s supposed to! Once everyone gets comfortable with sharing thoughts, you can make things a bit more serious and focus on getting some good leads. Still, don’t discount the value of a bad idea. If you’re clever, you can often turn it on its head so it becomes a good one.
- Build off of popular keywords. This is an especially good tip if you’re hoping to bring new traffic to your website; knowing what people are searching for is powerful information. Use a keyword suggestion tool like KeywordTool or Google’s Keyword Planner to see what people are typing into search engines. Chances are, you’ll be able to use those as a jumping off point for new blog posts.
- Stay current on hot topics. Look at trending hashtags, keep up with relevant social media chatter and images, read related blogs, and use a news aggregator like Feedly, Flipboard, Pulse, or one of several dozen others to simplify the process. Staying well informed is likely to generate questions in your mind; the answers, in longer and well-explained forms, are blog topics.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you’re really stuck, take to Twitter or Facebook to ask your followers what they’d like to see, and end some blog posts asking for relevant comments. Perhaps your readers and followers have questions they’d like answered, and maybe they can bring up ideas you hadn’t previously thought of.
Before you run out of topics for your blog, try running through these five techniques — and don’t forget to take notes! Writing things down, ideally in a central place, will keep all of the good ideas (and not so good ones) at hand when you’re ready to write. And if one of these tips doesn’t work for you? Don’t get frustrated! Try another approach.
What’s your best way to come up with blog ideas? How do you keep your content fresh? Leave a comment and tell us about it!