We’ve all been there: it’s time to publish a new blog post and you need to choose a blog post topic, but you haven’t a clue what to write. You’re all out of ideas.
If your imagination fountain has run dry, you need to find a way to turn it back on. My top ways to find blog topic ideas are:
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Picking a keyword
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Checking search queries that lead to your site
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Looking at your most popular posts
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Seeing what your competitors are writing about
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Reading the latest news
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Repurposing other content
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Pick a Keyword, Any Keyword
Good SEO practice helps people to find your blog posts. You might not think that SEO is a priority, but it’s essential if you want to bring more people to your site. Your blog should help to bring in new visitors, not just help existing ones.
Picking one of your keywords to inspire your next blog post allows you to work with SEO in mind, and also write a post that’s relevant to your audience. You should have a few primary keywords that you use for your site. Let’s say that you sell organic dog biscuits, so your main keywords that you want to rank for might be “organic dog biscuits” and “healthy dog food”.
Beyond these primary keywords, you can have many more related words and phrases, as well as long-tail keywords. These could be different variations of the same keyword; e.g. healthy dog biscuits, additive-free dog biscuits, organic dog snacks. They can also include related topics that might interest your visitors: dog diet tips, glossy dog coat advice, dog dental care, natural dog products.
If you need some keyword ideas, try Google’s keyword planner tool in Adwords. You can also do a Google search and look at the related searches at the bottom of the page. In the search bar, put … before or after a search term to show some ideas in the drop-down options – e.g. “…dog biscuits” or “dog biscuits…”
Consider how you might turn these keywords into long-tail key phrases and blog topics by incorporating them in more natural language. While people might search for “dog dental care”, they might also search for “how do I care for my dog’s teeth?” Remember that more people are using voice search these days, which makes them more likely to ask a question in a conversational manner.
Searching for Something
This one involves taking a look at how people arrive on your website. Take a look at your information from Google Analytics and Adwords, as well as other tools, to see what people are searching for to find your site. This should help you to choose a blog post topic that’s relevant to your audience.
If I take a look at the searches for my site, I can see that people are looking for “the cost of hiring a blogger”, “outsourcing blog posts”, “blog management services”, and “content for location-based keywords” (among other searches). So I might take a look at these and decide to write a post about how to make location-based keywords look natural in your content (coming soon to a blog post near you).
Hot Topics
Take a look at the blog posts you have published in the past, and see which ones are most popular. It’s that simple. Well, it’s not quite that simple. You can’t just write those posts again. But you can think of some similar topics, or think about why those posts were popular.
Is it the topic that you wrote about that people enjoyed, or perhaps the way you wrote about it? If your most successful blog post presented some quotes from experts on managing your dog’s diet, your next one could use the same format on the topic of keeping your dog’s coat healthy. Get back in touch with the people you approached before for some more handy quotes.
Copycats
Your competitors can be a great source of inspiration when you’re looking for blog topic ideas. You don’t have to copy them – in fact, it’s better that you don’t – but you can be inspired by the things they’re writing about. You can write about the same topics as them, but put your own angle on it. Don’t just think about how to fit the content to your brand – come up with some ideas to do it better than your competitors.
What’s Going On?
News in your industry or related areas can give you ideas whenever you need them. I find it helpful to set up a Google Alert for a keyword so that you get the latest news stories straight to your inbox. You can also check news sites, subscribe to blogs and newspapers, and use the News tab on Google searches.
You might use news stories to write about topical events or conversations. Or you could use them to inspire some other ideas. If you see a news story about the winners of Crufts, you could write a post about that, or maybe the cheekiest Crufts dogs in history.
Recycling
What other content do you have that you could use to create a blog post? You can repurpose other content to make informative and often more digestible blog posts. For example, you might have a white paper or an infographic that you can use.
You can take your long, detailed white paper and turn it (or some of it) into a blog post that’s less dense and easier to read. An infographic presents facts in a visual and snappy way, but you can expand on the information it presents and write a supporting blog post.
Next time you need to choose a blog post topic and you’re stuck for ideas, use these tricks to think of some topics. If you find yourself struggling for inspiration regularly, let me do it for you! Email me at [email protected] or take a look at my blog plans or blog management pages.
