Whipping out a couple of blog articles about your business is always easy. After all, you (hopefully) love your business, and have lots to talk about. Right?
Well… not necessarily.
For business owners who run a blog on their website, coming up with fresh content is one of the biggest challenges to online success.
After all, there are only so many ways you can talk about “running shoes” before even your most fervent fans feel a need to grab a bottle of Lucozade to recharge themselves between reading rethreads of the same, tired articles.
How can you ensure that you always have interesting, new topics to engage your prospects and customers with? It’s simple.
Scan your social media for “hot” news
Look out for trending topics in your social media feed and know that anything can relate to your business. All you need is a dash of creativity to tie the latest (and most attention-grabbing) news with your industry, products or services.
Look out for trending topics in:
Food
Sports
Music
Politics
Hobbies
Fashion
Entertainment (TV, movies, celebrities)
Events
News (local and international)
…and anything else that shows up on your social media food more than a few times. (Yes, this includes cat videos.)
Repurpose your existing blog articles
There’s nothing wrong with giving your older blog articles a new lease of life, by repurposing them.
What does “repurposing” mean? If you have an evergreen article that people love, you can always rewrite it from a new angle.
For example, “10 things to do before running your first marathon” can be repurposed to, “Running your first marathon? 10 beginners’ traps you must avoid!” (Be sure to rewrite your content so it’s fresh, and not simply a retitled blog post.)
This way, you can:
- Capture new readers
- Give existing readers a fresh perspective
- Remind Google about what your website is about (giving them another reason to rank you highly for a certain topic or search phrase)
Follow influential blogs
Often, the best sources of inspiration, can come from your biggest competitors. After all, these companies are the biggest (and best) in the industry for a reason – so why not learn from them?
Never copy your competitors, as this will degrade your brand as a “cheap rip-off”.
But do read their blogs, and learn what makes them great. After all, if they’re the best in the business, you’ll want to know what makes them so - and reading their blog posts, emailers, and other promotional materials, can open your mind to incredible possibilities.
And you’ll surely get ideas for new blog articles along the way.
Answer your customers’ questions in blog posts
A common question business owners ask me is, “How would I know if customers will be interested in my articles in the first place?”
Blog articles that answer your customers’ most common questions, are sure hits.
Why?
Because these are questions that your customers are already looking for answers for. (Whether they’ve explicitly asked you for the answers, or still have the questions in their head.)
Think about these questions, then write informational blog posts about them:
- What are some of the product or service-related questions your customers commonly ask you?
- What topics do customers ask you about most often?
- What do customers always seem to ask your opinion for? (This might even be something seemingly unrelated to your business. But trust me on this one – if customers are often asking you for an opinion about a certain topic, product, or service - it is most definitely related to your business.)
Keep an eye on forums
Where do most of your prospects go to when they can’t find fast (or good) answers to their questions?
Forums.
You don’t need to spend your days camped out on forum threads, keenly inspecting every post in every forum on the internet. Just keep a lookout in the popular ones.
Internationally, forums such as Reddit as incredibly popular (and a fantastic resource for blog or even business ideas). In Singapore, Hardwarezone and all its sub-forums are a hive of activity, and can be an ongoing source of information, ideas, and content for your blog.
Be creative
There are a lot more ways (as well as online tools and resources) that you can use to generate an endless stream of high quality blog ideas.*
You can be creative and think of new and innovative ways to find other new ideas – but if you’re stuck in a rut, I’m confident that these 5 simple techniques are all you’ll need to generate enough blog article topics today, to last you for the next half a year.
(Just dedicate a few hours to doing this today, without distractions – you may be surprised at your results!)
*If you’d like advice on any of other blog copywriting ideas or tools, feel free to contact me. I’ll be happy to share what I know with you. (Maybe you’ll even have some great ideas I can learn from.)
Image credit: Pixabay