Blogs are ravenous beasts. Whether you’re starting a brand-new blog or feeding an existing one, you know it’s important to post on a regular basis: every month, every week, even every day. And you know that those posts need to be fresh, relevant and engaging. There’s nothing more off-putting than dry or repetitive content, especially if it isn’t even useful.
So how do you keep coming up with new ideas? Learning to consistently generate blog topics is a big challenge, and one that can defeat the most dedicated blogger. But there are two pieces of good news here:
- Nobody knows your business as well as you do. You’re the expert, and you have a whole pool of knowledge you can bring to your posts.
- You don’t need to invent new blog topics. They’re already there, right under your nose.
Wait, where?!
How do I find topics for my blog?
The purpose of your blog is firstly to relay all that specialist knowledge of yours to your potential clients. Secondly, it’s to do it in such a way that they’ll want to reach out – whether that’s to ask you more questions, book a service, buy a product or schedule a call.
This means that coming up with new blog topics isn’t about conjuring them out of fresh air, or sitting at your desk waiting for the muse to show up. It’s about finding the questions people are asking, and answering them. Follow a few simple steps, and you’ll soon have more blog ideas than you know how to handle.
Step 1: Consult your customers
If your business is already up and running, you’ve got a rich source of new ideas close at hand. Your existing customers can tell you a lot about what future customers want to know.
That doesn’t mean ringing them up and firing intrusive questions at them; although perhaps you know them well enough that they wouldn’t mind? We’ll leave that one to you. It’s simply a matter of keeping track of the questions they ask you, identifying the trends, and picking out key terms that can form the basis of a post. For example:
- Can I use this product to do X?
- What are the steps involved in this service?
- Can you tell me more about the benefits?
- What is the payment schedule?
- What are the newest developments in this sector, and how will they affect my business?
You’ll sometimes find that your customers ask questions about things that seem perfectly obvious to you. That’s because you’re the subject expert, and you can’t always tell what’s clear to non-experts. Questions like this present a golden opportunity to bridge that knowledge gap.
For more ways to make the most of your customer enquiries, check out our detailed blog post here.
Step 2: Google time!
If you’re like most of us, then the first thing you do when you have a question is Google it. And that’s exactly what your potential customers do, too.
A surprisingly fun and easy way to get a sense of the questions they’re asking is to play around with Google autocomplete. Type the start of a question into Google, and let the algorithm throw up a list of suggestions. Here’s one we made earlier:
The more precise your wording, the more useful the suggestions are likely to be. What you’re looking to do is build a list of “long tail” keywords: more elaborate search terms that zero in on a specific question or concern. These can form the basis of a new blog post, but they also make excellent SEO-friendly titles. For example:
Any of these could be a highly informative post for those interested in sustainability, or even the basis for a series.
Step 3: Lurk online
Or, to give it a less sinister name, ‘social listening’. If your business is targeted to a specific group of people (sole traders, for example, or accountants, or web designers), it’s very likely that they have their own specialist forums and Q&A websites. This is where they ask questions, raise topics for discussion, and share knowledge with their peers.
You’ll often find business owners there too, offering answers and promoting their services. This isn’t a great sales tactic unless you’re a valued and active member of the community in your own right. In most cases, the most useful thing you can do is simply observe and take notes. What are the questions that come up again and again? Is there anything that’s particularly opaque, confusing or difficult for end users to understand? This is all prime material for your future posts, and it gives you more insight into your customers’ needs and experience.
Step 4: Categorise, analyse, create
By the time you’ve worked through steps 1 to 3, you should have a good pool of search terms, questions and topics. But not all of them will be created equal. As you sort through it all, ask yourself:
- Is this a clear, straightforward question with a simple answer? In that case, it might be good for a one-off post.
- Is this a big, complex topic with a lot of grey areas? This is the kind of theme that can be explored in an overarching series of longer, more in-depth pieces.
- Do any of these questions cluster together? If they’re fairly simple, it might be worth compiling them into a Q&A.
Building a content plan
At the end of the process, you’ll probably find you have a healthy range of content ideas, from 250-word LinkedIn-style posts to 500-word articles and 1,000-word explainers. When it comes to writing your next blog post, the biggest problem will be which topic to pick!
This is where a good content plan is crucial. That’s worth a whole blog post on its own – and luckily, we’ve already written it. We also included a few extra content ideas, just in case you’re running short.
If you’re looking for more guidance with your content strategy, WordHound is always on hand to help. Just drop us a line or book your totally free, no-strings content review, where we’ll talk through a few options and help you decide on a plan.
