Feeling stumped on blog topics? You’re not alone. Everyone wants to have a handful of ideas ready to go, preferably for the upcoming month, if not longer. But how can you keep coming up with new topics, week in, week out? No worries! Here are our top 6 avenues for easily choosing topics for your upcoming blogs.
1. FAQs. From communicating with customers, potential customers, and others, you’re probably got at least a few frequently asked questions. Each question is likely a blog post in its own right, if not more than one post. While many businesses have an “FAQ” page on their website, the answers tend to be short. Use the opportunity to expand the answer into a full blog post.
2. Competitors. What are your competitors saying on their blogs that you would also like to say, but differently? How can you stand out among (or against) the competition? Do you want to be controversial, or complementary? Reading your competitors’ blogs will give you a wealth of ideas, and knowing where you want to position yourself in comparison with competitors will help you decide how to approach and present those ideas.
3. Connect the Topics. Your blog is meant to attract people who would be interested in your products or services, but it doesn’t have to be ABOUT your products and services. If it’s connected to your niche, and a topic of interest for your potential clients, it’s relevant. For example, a computer support firm doesn’t sell iPads to their clients, but a good blog topic could be the latest Apple products. An accounting firm (boring topic, right?) could talk about anything connected to finance, up to and including mental-curveball, intriguing topics such as the impact the dragon Smaug’s death had on the economy of Middle-Earth.
4. A Day in the Life of a Customer. Put yourself in the mind of some of your customers. What kind of lives are they living that make them interested in your products/services? What are their routines like? Are they parents, students, young, old? Who. Are. They? If you find some common ground among most of your target audience, write about relevant lifestyle topics of interest. If you write a blog for your jewelry business, and you know that most of your clientele are young mothers and middle-aged women wanting to beautify their lives, you could discuss do-it-yourself interior decorating ideas.
Talking about relatable topics is like being at an office party and specifically not talking about work, but rather discussing something else you know will interest many of your fellow employees.
5. News Items. Be sure to scour industry-related magazines or news sections. You might either read them directly, or get linked to them via social media. Either way, each news item can be a jump-off topic for a blog. For instance, a small town private security company used a locally-reported robbery for a blog topic about how to prevent such incidences. Using a news story as a topic shows that you are keeping up to date with what’s going on in relation to your services, and also serves as a way to connect with your readers via recent, real-life scenarios.
6. Themes. Oftentimes, blog writers pick a theme for a few weeks. For example, for the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, a women’s health website might blog a series on specific topics about “Relationships” or “Love” and their effect on health. Or a cleaning product site might offer “Tuesday Tips” for maintaining a clean and orderly home, office, and car.
You see? You don’t have to be uber-creative to come up with blog topics. By using the above guidelines, it becomes a breeze to sit down and brainstorm in order to come up with an outline for your next few blogs. You can do this by yourself for your own business, brainstorm with an employee, or work with an independent blog writer. The more heads you have, the swifter it will be to create a long list of killer blog topics for your audience.
Submitted by Chaya Leah