Most businesses have website blogs. Blogging is an easy way to provide useful information to a target audience and increase site traffic. In addition, blogs serve as ideal content for social promotions and marketing campaigns. Whether you’re a hair salon or a web design agency, visitors to your website are looking for information.
Doesn’t it only seem fitting to provide them with continuously useful content?
Rather than just filling in space with words, wouldn’t you love it if people actually enjoyed reading what you wrote about and left comments at the bottom of the page?
Having a regularly updated blog is an effective tool for online marketing. The challenge is coming up with fresh content on a routine basis. You can’t just recycle old content day in and day out. You need to come up with original ideas. Here are some tips to help you never run out of topics to blog about.
Follow the Current Events
The best way to find new topics to blog about is to read the news. Always original, the news serves as a blogger’s playground. With so much happening in the world on a daily basis, there will always be something in the news relevant to your business or enterprise, no matter what that may be.
Set aside sometime every day to browse through relevant news sources and jot down a few events that might make good blog posts. Eventually, you’ll be able to narrow down your sources to those that continuously have industry-relevant content, making the search process much more streamlined.
Welcome the Guest Posts
Perhaps you’re not that great of a writer or you simply don’t have enough time to dedicate to your blog. Accepting guest post submissions is a great way to accumulate content without actually having to carve the time out to write it yourself. Plus, it can be extremely beneficial to amass others’ points of views, as guest writers might have some very valuable insight to offer your readers.
The best way to approach guest posting is to develop a set of guidelines that include desired blog topics, target length, required links and photos (if any), and how to submit a post. While some websites pay writers to submit feature publications, many websites rely solely on donated guest post submissions. The more clout your site has on the internet, the more likely readers are going to want to submit posts, and the higher quality they’re likely to be.
Angle is Everything
With so much information circulating around the internet, it can be hard to find subjects that haven’t been written about. Taking ideas from other people’s original content is okay — as long as you’re not plagiarizing. Try to find interesting content that you can develop your own angle for.
For example, maybe you want to write a blog post about how to build a website. Perhaps you’ve come across an article on how to choose the right web-platform — instead of copying this topic, come at the concept with a different angle. Write a blog post on how to create a unique domain name and link to any relevant sources.
Recycle, Don’t Reuse
It can be tempting to re-post old content after a certain period of time has passed. Once you’ve established a substantial library of articles, why not repost the ones that performed well? While it might be okay to reuse content once in a while, it’s definitely not recommended. Readers don’t want to read the same information over and over — they want something new and exciting. Also, a lot of information becomes outdated over time. But if you insist on reusing your old content, don’t just hit the repost button — recycle it instead. Here are some suggestions:
- Make updates to a previous article for a fresh new approach before re-posting.
- Take an old idea and expand on it — adding additional value.
- Change the title, introduction, and conclusion paragraph to something more personalized.
- Rewrite the old article, using the same idea but from a fresh perspective.
Be Educational and Explain Things
Blog posts that tend to perform well time and time again are those that offer helpful hints to readers, such as “how-to” articles. Look at what’s trending in your particular industry and analyze ways to help readers develop their own relative skills.
For example, if you own a cooking blog, perhaps you could write an article on “How to Have Dinner Ready in Under Thirty Minutes.” If you own a web design business you could write an article on “How to Optimize Landing Pages for Readability”. “How-to” articles make excellent blog posts, as they are both engaging and informative. It is very easy to come up with new content in this category — use the internet for reference or perhaps reach out to your readers and ask them what they might want to learn about. Speaking directly to your audience is a great way to gain repeat readers.
Rely on Alternate Forms of Media
In this burgeoning world of technology, we have so many more tools at our fingertips than simple print resources. Spice up your blog with heavily infographic-based posts or a video log (called a “vlog”). Use other forms of media to your advantage — a blog post doesn’t have to be all words, it can be primarily picture-based instead.
You can take an idea you’ve already written an article for and express the content via infographics and diagrams for an entirely fresh post. This is an acceptable way to use old content and in this way transforms it into something completely original.
Did You Try Reddit? Make Use of it
Reddit is one of the best places to find trending internet articles and unlikely inspiration. With more than 30 million active users, Reddit is a platform for “hot topics” that visitors to your website would likely be interested in reading about.
Reddit is renowned for its extremely active community — highlighted by millions of posts, comments, and long threads of conversation. Whether you’re looking for an actual subject to write a blog post on or just a source of inspiration, Reddit is a great place to start.
Share Your Personal Experiences
People love reading about others’ experiences — whether failures or successes. They like being able to relate to other humans on a personal level. As a business owner, you’ve already traveled a long road that has likely been marked with many successes and failures. Why not turn these stories into blog posts?
Write an article on how you achieved a specific goal or worked through a particularly difficult time. Maybe it’s a blog post on how you started your own business, or how you failed at being a doctor and instead became a lawyer. People like to read personal stories because either directly or indirectly, they’re likely to relate.
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