Tips For Coming Up With Good Blog Topics

  Planning good blog content month after month presents a significant challenge, even to some seasoned writers. Keeping new content with effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on your site is critical to your search result rankings and to building engagement with your site visitors. How do you keep producing a steady flow of fresh material on your company's website? Here are some tips for coming up with good blog topics:  

• Write For The Customers You Have - Write content aimed at your core customer base most often. Business blogging is evolving quickly, and it's no longer enough to throw a bunch of keywords into some second-rate content that mostly pertains to your business. Think about what challenges your customers face, and how your products or services can alleviate those. Think about what practices your customers could adopt that would benefit their businesses and cause them to use more of your products in the process. Write about new legislation or standards that may affect your customers. The goal is not simply to bring them to your site; the goal is to write blog posts that they will find helpful and want to share with colleagues. Use your blog content to showcase your expertise and make your site a hub for useful information in your niche.

 

• Write For The Customers You Want - The next most important set of readers you should be writing blog posts for is the group of customers you want, but do not yet have. As an example, if your company sells industrial gases and your core customers are shops that use welders, ask yourself who else would use industrial gases. They're used in laboratories, food-processing plants, cryogenics, and by wedding planners, to name a few. The customers you have now are welders, and you should address them, but don't overlook the opportunity to court new groups of customers by acknowledging them and showing them that you can support their businesses and alleviates their headaches, too.

 

• Look For The Tangents And Spins - Browse the blogs of competitors and look for points mentioned in their blog posts that you can take and develop into an original (and hopefully better) post of your own. Another way to make use of your competition is to cherry-pick the best points from posts by more than one competitor and combine them into an original piece with your own spin. Take a topic that someone else has covered in broad strokes (like a listicle) and expand it into a series of in-depth pieces.

 

• Hitch A Ride On The Latest Trend - Always keep an eye out for new trends, product releases, laws or regulations, or breaking news affecting your customers' businesses. Frame those posts in terms of your customers' interests, not those of your own business; this is a fine distinction that many bloggers fail to make. Customers return to and interact most frequently with blogs that are in tune with the challenges and opportunities those customers are dealing with. Be the first one to turn your customers' attention to some helpful new technology or practice, even if it's not something you sell, and you're building a loyal following of customers who are more likely to remain engaged.

 

• Plan Seasonal Content - "Seasonal content" reaches far beyond holidays. How you take advantage of seasonal changes depends on your business. But in general, think of seasonal content as an opportunity to build business for traditionally slow times and to get customers planning your products or services into the budgets for the future. For example, if your company sells and installs windows, winter is going to be a slow season. Plan a post for January that explains how much it could cost customers to "tough out" the rest of the winter with a broken window, and how surprisingly simple it is for your installers to replace that window, even in the snow. Start in March by telling those same customers how important it will be, once the snow melts, to have their windows inspected and take care of any needed repairs of maintenance in order to save money and maintain comfort through the summer.

  Plan For Your Most Effective Blog Posts   Taking the time to study the trends of your own industry and those of your customers can offer a wealth of ideas for good blog topics, and so can shopping the competition. Keep a running list of topic ideas, and a master calendar that you'll refine from year to year as you learn what content resonates most strongly with the customers you have and the ones you hope to gain in future. If you find yourself struggling to find enough topics on a regular basis, start looking for ways to develop short, simple laundry lists into series that will bring readers back at regular intervals to learn more. Working with an SEO company like Design & Promote, Chicago area customers have access to expert advice and professional help with keeping their content fresh and on-target. Contact Design & Promote for a complimentary website audit and additional information about developing effective blog topics for your company's website.

This subsequent article Tips For Coming Up With Good Blog Topics was available on Design & Promote