Business blogging: Coming up with topics for your posts
Coming up with great business blog topics and ideas for posts can be really tricky, especially when you’re first getting started. After the initial excitement of your new website launch fades you may be left wondering what to write about. If you’re not careful you’ll lose enthusiasm and give up on your blog. Next thing you know, your users are wondering if you went out of business because you ‘latest’ post is 18 months old.
What topics should you write about?
When writing a business blog the most important thing is to make sure that your customers find it interesting or valuable. Your blog should encourage them to take some action that ties in with your overall website strategy. So how do you choose what to write about? You may have ideas about what you think will be interesting to your audience but how do you really know? And what if you have no ideas at all?
How to start coming up with business blog topics
1. Keep a record of customer questions
Recording questions that come up during sales meetings or support calls is a great source of inspiration for business blog topics. Note down any question that’s asked frequently and write a post answering it. This will give potential customers confidence in your product as you are obviously thinking about their interests.
2. Write about complementary products and services.
A rural hotel which gets a lot of walkers could write a post about the five most popular local hiking trails on its blog, or feature a list of the top hiking apps for iPhone and Android. A drinks manufacturer could review the best flasks available for keeping drinks hot in the Winter and cool in the Summer. Thinking about the additional things customers must buy alongside your product and helping them like this will put you in a very good light.
3. Find out what searches people are making that relate to your service.
KeywordTool.io is a free service which shows you what terms people are searching for in Google related to any topic. All you have to do is enter a word related to your industry and you’ll be shown related searches which have been recorded by Google. For example, if you type in ‘car cleaning’ you’ll see a list of previous searches including things you’d expect like car cleaning advice. but there are also some surprising results which show that people are searching for games and quizzes related to car cleaning too. These kind of results might give you ideas for your blog that you’d never think of normally and it’s all based on what real people are already searching for so you know it’ll be of interest.
Hopefully these quick tips will help you start to come up with business blog topics to write about. Let me know if you’ve ever struggled to come up with ideas of what to write about by leaving a comment below. Or do you have any business blogging advice that you’d like to share?