Blogging is a tried and proven way of promoting a business because people love to read blogs. According to Social Media Today, 77% of Internet users read blogs on a daily basis. That’s why business websites should have a blog page. It can effectively drive traffic to your website and create awareness about your business.
But the challenge for many bloggers is:
“What do I blog about?”
6 Tips On How To Find Topics To Blog About
If you’ve been blogging for some time but the well of ideas has dried out or if you’re an entrepreneur who’s thinking of starting a page, this blog is for you.
We’ll give you valuable tips on how to choose blog topics that will deliver the results you want. After reading this blog, you’ll spend more time tapping away at the keyboard than cluelessly looking at a blank page on your monitor.
Let’s start with the golden rule a lot of bloggers tend to forget…
1. Remember the Golden Rule
“Write for your audience, not for yourself.”
Blogging isn’t writing about topics that you’re interested in. It’s writing about topics that your audience is interested in.
You might think this approach is counter-intuitive.
“Aren’t I supposed to blog about topics that will help my business achieve its goals?”
Correct, BUT your approach to reaching those business goals through blogging should be taken from the perspective of your audience. Specifically, you want to know what your audience is searching for.
- Is your audience searching for solutions to current problems? If so, what are these problems, and do I have the products and services that can help them find a resolution?
- Is your audience looking for specific information to update their knowledge and understanding? If so, do I have the experience and expertise to share information that’s updated and relevant to their search?
- Is your audience thinking about finding hacks and tips that can be of value to them in the future? If so, can you share hacks and tips that can’t be found on any other website but yours?
Some entrepreneurs believe that blogging is a platform where they can shine the spotlight on their knowledge about the business and the industry. They’ve acquired the necessary education, training, and experience to be practically considered experts on these topics.
For example, you’re a business consultant who’s excited about writing on Behavioral Leadership. What if 90% of your audience is more interested in learning how to start a home-based business?
You’ll end up blogging to impress, not blogging to help. As great as the information shared in your article, it will amount to time wasted because hardly anyone will run a search query on “behavioral leadership”.
When choosing a blog topic, always choose with your readers in mind. Find out what they want to read about. The time spent blogging will be a productive one and you’ll end up impressing your audience even more.
2. Identify the Objective of Your Blog
What do you want to achieve from blogging?
Blogging has been used by digital marketers as a tool to accomplish various business goals. These goals include the following:
- Build the business brand
- Website optimization
- Drive more inbound traffic to the website
- Generate leads
- Enhance your reputation as an expert or as a reliable resource
- Expand your market/audience reach
- Promote new/current products and services
- Improve sales
- Increase the number of followers on social media
Identifying the objective of your blog will help you map out the blogging strategy. You can have a long-term singular goal and have it supported by several smaller goals.
For example, your long-term goal is to improve sales with blogging as one of your primary digital marketing tools.
Improving sales is all about improving the probability of making a sale. This means increasing the size of your market/audience. If we assume a 2% success rate in realizing a sale, you can increase sales more by expanding the size of your market to 1,000 compared to 100.
Thus, in order to hit your long-term goal of improving sales, your initial goal or short-term goal is to increase the size of your audience.
A good strategy would be to blog 2-3 times a week for the first 1-2 months. You could blog about popular industry/market topics and include a few off-base but relevant search topics.
Going back to our previous example, a business consultant could have the following blog schedule:
A. Industry/Market Topics:
- How To Start A Home-Based Business
- 5 Reasons Remote Work Can Reduce the Cost of Business
- Why It’s Important to Find Employees That Fit Your Business
- The Number One Reason Why Small Businesses Fail
- How To Avoid the Debt Trap For Your Business
B. Off-Base but Relevant Topics:
- Why Health and Fitness Matters to Your Entrepreneurial Success
- Does Health Make Wealth?
- 3 Easy Steps to Planning Your Next Vacation
- Should You Remove Toxic People From Your Life?
- The Best Countries to Visit on Your Next Vacation
Mixing up industry/market topics with topics that are somewhat off-base is a good idea because it shows the audience you’re well-rounded and accessible. It’s a wonderful strategy for building a brand and creating trust with your audience.
Publish these blogs on your social media pages. Share it with your friends and contacts and ask them if they can share the blogs with their respective communities.
Look for blogging opportunities on popular blog sites and find out if you can write for them. Most importantly, make sure there’s a link to your website in every blog.
3. Check Out the Competition
In the next 3 numbers, we’ll discuss the best sources for high-demand topics.
Let’s start with your competition. If they want their websites found and indexed by Google, blogging will be a mainstay in the digital marketing toolbox.
Their websites and social media pages will be good sources of possible blog topics.
- Find out what they have blogged about. List down these blog topics and organize them into categories. What’s the frequency of posting per topic?
- Assess the engagement levels per topic. Which topics received the highest levels of engagement such as likes, shares, and comments?
- Analyze the growth of the social media pages. How many social media followers do your closest competitors have?
- Read the comments of the page’s followers. What are the frequently asked questions or concerns raised by the commenters?
- Go through the websites of your competitors. Closely review the copy per webpage. What products or services are your competitors highlighting in their web copy?
For sure you’re familiar with the saying, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer”.
Why not sign up for your competitors’ newsletters and join their social media communities? This way, you’ll regularly receive content from them and know what they’re up to.
Sure, you’re adding to their numbers but joining their communities is a smart way of getting valuable resources for blog topic research and saves you valuable time.
4. Visit Popular Industry Websites
If you’re selling athleisure merchandise, you probably visit the websites of Nike, Adidas, and Lululemon.
These are the big players in the athleisure wear industry. If anyone has their finger on the pulse of the market, it’s the big players. You grow in size if you’re able to consistently deliver what the market wants.
Whether you’re a startup or a company that’s been in business for fewer than 5 years, popular websites in the industry are a goldmine of topic ideas for blogs. Go through the same process of analyzing content as you did with your competitors’ websites and social media pages.
Sometimes these websites share data on trends and developments in the industry. Bookmark these pages and if there is a downloadable PDF with the latest industry statistics, keep them on file as a reference.
You’ll save time and have access to accurate information from research funded by the giants of the industry. Knowing what the trends are will make it easier for you to create a blog topics list.
5. Perform Keyword Research
If you know how to do keyword research, that’s a wonderful process for discovering popular blog topics for your audience.
To run a search, people type in keywords related to the subject matter or topic they’re looking for. Keyword research will help you uncover the words and phrases commonly used by consumers when searching for information in your industry.
Identify these keywords and you’ll know exactly what your audience is looking for.
In the athleisure business, popular keywords might include:
- Yoga wear
- Sportswear
- Gym tops
- Activewear
- Golfing outfits
- Running wear
- Athletic outfit
- Cheap sportswear
- Athletic wear near me
Here’s a quick tutorial on basic keyword research.
- Sign up for Google Keyword Planner. All you need is a Gmail account.
- Set the parameters of your search – target region and language.
- Type in the keywords “yoga wear”, “sportswear”, “gym tops”, “active wear”, and “golfing outfits” in the query box then press enter.
- Google Keyword Planner will produce a spreadsheet listing keyword searches with the highest volume.
- Get the keyword with the highest monthly searches and use it to run a Google search.
- Google’s SERP will list down webpages with topics that contain the keyword.
Now, you have a list of potential topics for your blogs!
There are a number of online tools you can use to conduct keyword research. We wrote a blog on keyword research and the best tools you can use to generate favorable SEO results. You can read the blog by clicking on this link.
Another benefit of identifying high-search keywords is that you can use them to optimize your blog. Keywords help the search engine crawl bots find content that is relevant to the user’s search query.
When you embed these high search volume keywords in your blogs, it will make your content more visible online.
Strategically, you should have the main keyword in the title, the first sentence of the first paragraph, the middle section, and the conclusion of the blog. You’ll need to sprinkle a few secondary keywords to support your blog.
6. Ask Your Audience
If you want to know what topics interest your audience – ask them.
Digital marketing is a game changer for businesses because it incorporates processes that make it possible for you to reach your audience directly.
Social media is one of these processes. By posting frequently on your social media page, you can become top-of-mind with your followers. Every time you post, you invite engagement.
In your blogs, conclude with a Call-to-Action that asks readers what other topics they want you to write about. Before you post the blog on your social media pages, include the CTA to the lead-in.
Here’s an example:
“In our latest blog, we’ll give you a breakdown of the most viable home-based business ideas in 2024. What else do you want us to write about? Share your thoughts in the comments section.”
Comments are viable sources of blog topics and present doors of opportunity. They are a by-product of thoughts and ideas that preoccupy your audience. We recommend taking a few minutes each day to read comments on your posts.
You can be more direct with your approach and simply post this query on your social media pages:
“Guys, what topics would you want us to cover? Please share in the comments section below. We’d like to help. Thank you!”
Another effective digital marketing process is email marketing. Once you’ve acquired a solid database of leads, you can email them short-form blogs or newsletters once a month.
With email marketing, you can categorize your subscribers into groups based on data from analytics. The analytics of your website and social media pages will help you create near-accurate profiles of your audience. You’ll have a better understanding of the types of content they like to read.
Similar to your social media posts, always ask your newsletter subscribers what topics they want you to cover in the future.
Chat plugins are another effective channel for engaging your followers. Send out a chat that reads:
“Hi (Name of Follower),
“Thank you for following our social media page. We’d like to get feedback from you if you don’t mind.
“Please let us know what topics you want us to cover in upcoming blogs. We want to make sure our followers are well taken care of.
“Again thank you and we look forward to your response.”
Your audience is a wonderful resource for blog ideas. As a plus, asking for their suggestions will make them feel special and important. Definitely, a big boost for your business branding efforts.
Conclusion
We hope that our blog helped you gain clarity on how to find topics to blog about. While it’s important to blog frequently, it’s always better to focus on quality content over quantity.
The Golden Rule is your bottom line: Always blog with your audience in mind. Give them quality content that’s fresh, unique, useful, informative, and engaging to a point that the blogs will compel readers to act.
Of course, a better option is to let us blog for you!
Over the years, Mountaintop Web Design has produced high-quality content that has helped our clients build their businesses. As proof, our blogs have been cited by the B2B networking site UpCity as among the best in digital marketing.
Our blogs are well-researched and optimized for search engines. You can rest assured that your blogs will be visible to the eyes that need to read them on the Internet.
Give us a call or drop us an email and we’ll get your blog page started right away. And if you enjoyed this blog, feel free to share it with your community.
