For your content marketing strategy to succeed, your business must consistently produce high-quality content that is original, useful, and informative. As many bloggers quickly discover, continually finding unique blog topics that users are interested in isn’t always easy!
If you write about topics that don’t engage your audience, they will tune out and stop reading your blog. The many hours you have spent writing amazing content will mean nothing. Some of the signs indicating that your blog topics aren’t cutting the mustard include:
Your well-researched and original posts aren’t drawing much traffic
Users aren’t sharing your posts on social media
Users aren’t clicking on the offer that is associated with the blog post
Traffic to your blog has started to decline
Analytics software tells you that most readers don’t finish reading the article and bounce off quickly
Fortunately, there are some great techniques available for finding topics that are fresh and engaging for your audience. By using these techniques, you can create original blog posts that fascinate your readers and dramatically improve the success of your blog. Let’s get started!
#1 — Write about the questions that your customers often ask
Customers are a great resource for bloggers! Their feedback and questions can help you develop fantastic ideas for new blog topics. You can also write a weekly or monthly post that discusses the common questions or complaints that customers have. If they find a certain product difficult to use, write a post explaining the proper usage. If you discover that some customers aren’t using a product to its full potential, demonstrate the full capabilities of that product in a blog post.
There are many ways to gather questions from customers, including:
Collect a list of the common support questions asked by customers online and at your retail stores.
Read your blog comments, look for questions and problems that people are having
Look at the comments and questions on your social media pages
An additional benefit obtained from using this approach is that you will be creating a useful repository of answers to common questions — which is handy when you are providing customer support. Eventually, your blog will be seen as an authoritative source of information and answers.
#2 — Use an online tool to brainstorm ideas
There are numerous tools that take the keywords you provide and suggest a variety of topics that you could write about. Even if some of the ideas provided by these tools are a bit silly, they often work as a great starting point when brainstorming new ideas. Some of the best tools for generating blog topic ideas include:
* Blog Post Idea Generator
* HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator
* Blog Title Idea Generator
#3 — Find ideas in books
Don’t forget about the “old school” resources at your disposal! Browsing books on topics that are related to your business is an excellent way to discover potential new blog topics. You can browse eBooks online or head down to your local library. You don’t have to read the entire book to find ideas for topics — simply examine the book’s chapter headings and index to gain some inspiration.
#4 — Search social media for hot topics that people are interested in
You can find blog topics that will be engaging for readers by identifying the hot topics on social media. If people are already discussing the topic and asking questions about it, they are far more likely to read and share a blog post that you write.
There are some great tools for finding hot social media topics including Buzzsumo and Bottlenose. Buzzsumo allows you to search for specific topics, then returns a list of the most popular blog posts and their total social media shares. Bottlenose helps you find top trending topics, recent comments, and trending links relating to your search term.
#5 — Use Quora to find in-demand blog topics
Quora is one of the world’s most popular question and answer platforms. Users respond to questions with interesting facts and opinions. It is very useful for finding potential blogging topic ideas. Simply search for the topic you are interested in, then look at the questions that people are asking. If you write a topic that is an Open Question (unanswered question), you know that people will be interested in the subject matter.
#6 — Look at what your competitors are writing about
Take a quick look at the blogs of your competitors and identify any topics that you find particularly interesting. When you decide to blog about a topic that has already been tackled by a competitor, it is important that your blog post is much stronger and carries more value. It must be very well-researched.
This will help you establish your blog as a stronger source of knowledge in the eyes of readers and helps your content rank higher in search engine results.