Is there anything that inbound marketers worry about more than coming up with blog topics? They stress, worry, and pull their hair out, hoping they’ll devise exactly the write blog topic to maximize their traffic and bring in all the leads.
But writing is so subjective, the perfect blog topic can’t be found, because it’s not going to be perfect in everyone’s mind. A blog topic you think is brilliant may seem ridiculous to someone else, or vice versa. Therefore, we just have to do the best we can to come up with topics that will be of interest to our readers. How can we accomplish that? Here are some tips:
Stop worrying about it so much
Have you ever heard the saying, “you can’t see the forest for the trees”? It means you’re looking too deeply into the details of something, and need to take a step back. I think this happens far too often to content writers, as they try so desperately to come up with excellent blog topics.
The real key is to write thoughtful, interesting articles about topics that your buyer persona is searching for on Google. A topic is just meant to draw the traffic in – it’s your writing that will seal the deal. If you take all of the pressure off of the situation, you’ll be surprised how much more easily the ideas flow in.
Recall your own marketing experience
If you’re involved on the marketing side, even if it’s in content, then surely you’ve had some direct experience handling marketin. Recall those times you worked directly with clients, and consider how those meetings went. What were the clients most concerned with? What presented the greatest marketing challenges? What was your greatest success with the client? If you can figure out the answers to questions like these, they would make great blog topics.
Poke around the internet a bit
You should never steal ideas from others; however, you can certainly be inspired by them. If you haven’t already, find some quality business and/or marketing blogs to read from time to time. When you’re struggling for a topic, you can go back to those blogs and read a few posts in hopes of inspiration. Just be careful: sometimes, writers can accidentally repeat something they’ve read recently. Stealing topics from other blogs would be very bad for your business’ reputation, as well as yours.
Update an old blog
OK, this last one is kind of like cheating, but it’s a pretty common inbound practice. Even if you’re updating your blog every single day, HubSpot’s research found that 92 percent of leads came from “old” posts – essentially, any article posted in the past. How do we capitalize on that? By updating those posts.
You should occasionally go back and re-read your popular articles to see which ones could be updated. For instance, if there’s a blog topic that has some new research related to it, that would be an excellent article to update.
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