Your blog should be kept fresh, interesting and original. It may sound simple, but when you’re trying to produce regular blog posts for your business blog, it can be a struggle to continually come up with content ideas which tick all of these boxes. It’s easy to fall into the trap of churning out the same type of content over and over, or regurgitating the same tips or advice in a different way.
Yes, refreshing or repurposing your content is a great way to get more out of it, but you need to keep coming up with new ideas if your business blog is going to continue to be interesting and relevant to your readers and potential customers. But with business owners and marketers often struggling to find time to manage everything, creativity and originality can be stifled. So here’s a few tips to help you generate more content ideas for your blog.
1. Use Google’s keyword planner tool
You may have used the keyword planner for your Google advertising, but it’s also a handy tool for generating ideas for content topics. And the beauty of this is you can see how many people are searching for particular topics, so you’ll know what the demand for this type of content is like.
If you’re trying to promote a particular product or service, try to be specific when you’re using the tool, and it will give you more relevant content ideas.
For example, if you’re a florist and you’d like to promote your wedding flowers, you’ll want to target brides to be, and create content that they’re searching for. You may start by typing in “flowers”, or “wedding flowers” as the product you offer.
But by using the keyword planner to find more niche search terms, you can find many more topic ideas for your blog. If you were to type in “centrepieces” as your product, you’ll see a list of more niche phrases which brides to be are searching for, and which you can specifically create content for, such as:
- Vintage centrepieces
- Tall centrepieces
- Feather centrepieces
- Vase centrepieces
- Outdoor centrepieces
- Crystal centrepieces
- Unusual centrepieces
- Candle centrepieces
- Tree centrepieces
- Unique centrepieces
- Rose centrepieces
- Simple centrepieces
And many more!
So, instantly, you can see what your customers are looking for, and create content which suits. You could create blog posts about individual search terms, or you can use the search terms to create fewer, more in-depth and varied pieces of content about centrepieces.
There are other tools which can be useful for looking at search terms, such as Ubersuggest or SEMRush. These tools will give you a list of related search terms based on real searches.
2. Days of the year
We’re all familiar with the main holidays and events: Christmas, Easter, Valentines, Hallowe’en, etc. But every day is dedicated to something.
There are a host of nationally and internationally recognised days of observance, such as World Autism Awareness Day, International Women’s Day, World Book Day, a litany of saints’ days, and many more.
But there are also a lot more obscure days, weeks and months of observance, whether they’re official or not. These days honour everything from watermelons to golf, jobs to orphans, accountants to X-rays, and everything in between.
Check out Daysoftheyear.com to see thousands of examples of these days. You’re sure to find something that’s relevant to your business or industry, which you can create an interesting blog post about.
Very often, we see these days trending on social media, even the more obscure days, so creating content in advance and promoting it via your social media channels when the time comes can help to drive traffic through to your blog.
3. Listen!
It may seem obvious, but one of the best ways of generating content ideas is by listening to your customers and potential customers. What are their issues and concerns? What questions do you get asked? How can you help them? If you’re getting asked the same questions time and again, there’s a blog post in it. Make a conscious effort to take note of the topics and questions which keep coming up, and ask your staff to do the same. Use the knowledge and experience you already have.
It’s not just the customers you deal with that can give you ideas for new blog topics, but consumers online can be a valuable source of inspiration too. There are social media listening tools which can help you find the conversations consumers are having about your products, services, industry and your company. All of this can be used to find ways of adding value to your potential customers through your blog.
4. Prepare for the trends
“I should’ve written a blog about that.” I’m sure many of us have said this to ourselves when we realise we’ve missed an opportunity to piggy back on a hot topic.
Some things you can’t really prepare for, like when Madonna takes a tumble thanks to a wardrobe malfunction, or when Luis Suarez has a nibble on another player, or when the lights go out at the Superbowl. This is where real time marketing comes in. The quicker you can create good content about unexpected things like these, the better.
If you can put a spin on an unexpected event which makes it relevant to your business and your target customers, and get it out before the rest, you can get great return and traffic to your blog.
But there are always going to be trending topics which you can predict, and those are the ones you can be ready for in advance.
You can be fairly sure the big events and news stories will trend, and by looking ahead at what’s coming up, you can be prepared for it, with your blog content at the ready. Then, it’s all down to the content promotion when the event happens.
5. Research
The internet is full of great content. Packed to the rafters with the stuff. So use it! I don’t mean steal someone else’s content – that’s a definite no. But you can get great ideas from other blogs. Check out what others in your field are writing about. Not just your nearest competitors, but blogs from all over the world. See what’s out there, and what’s popular. Use this to get inspiration for your own blog.
And if listening to your customers and conversations online isn’t enough, do some research of your own. Ask for input, create a survey, or have a focus group. Dedicated research like this can throw up all sorts of new ideas for your content.
So you can get reams of content ideas using these tips, but a word of caution. Whatever you write about, make sure it’s relevant to both your business and your customers. I’ve seen businesses blogging about events and topics that don’t seem to have relevance, or at least, they haven’t made it relevant in their content.
A bit of creativity means you can find relevance in a lot of topics which don’t appear to be related to your business at first, but make sure this relevance is clear to your audience, or it becomes confusing and, well, irrelevant!
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