As a business owner you juggle so many tasks on a daily basis, finding the time to research topics for your next blog post can be overwhelming. Where do you start?
Content is the voice of your marketing strategy. Therefore the content you produce needs to be helping potential customers move through their buying journey, and help them make a purchase decision, that you want to influence.
Start with research
So in order to be able to build your content plan, I recommend you do your market research first to understand what content a potential customers needs, in what format and on what platform. Then you can get to work building your blog content plan.
Building your content plan
Once you have uncovered what content they need and start to build your content plan, you need to research you core topics and focus keyword for each blog. Here are my top 5 tips as to where you can source blog topic inspiration from:
1. Google Alerts
Signing up to receive regular Google Alerts is a great starting point. You will receive emails when new results for a topic show up in Google Search. For example, you can get information about news, products, or mentions of your name. You could select a topic such as “Digital marketing”.
So have a think about what the industries and topics are you’d like to start writing about and set up your Google Alerts accordingly.
2. Google keyword research
The next place to look is to Google, and in the search box start to type a topic you are thinking about writing about e.g. “How to grow a small business”. Then underneath the option that you have typed in the search box in Google, you will see some suggestions by Google as to what other people have searched for.
And you can scroll further down the search results page too and Google will show a section called “People also searched for…” and give you examples. This can be a great source of topic inspiration for your content plan.
3. Industry blog
I also recommend singing up for industry blogs, for your specific industry. By reading regular industry blogs it can spark an idea for a blog that your potential customers would really benefit from reading.
4. Buzzsumo
What I love about Buzzsumo is that you can search for a core topic, and then it will show you what articles have been written featuring your keyword, and how many shares the article got, engagement across the social media platforms etc. This will give you a good indication of how popular a topic is.
Read the articles, and write a blog that’s even better than what’s already been written!
5. Quora
The final site you can use for inspiration is Quora, which is a questions and answers site where people can go on and answer a question on any topic. So if you do a search here and see what topics are being asked you will know what topics you need to write about.
So there you have my tip five tips to help you gain inspiration for your next blog post, or social-media post. Do the research, build your content plan and draw potential customers to you via useful helpful blogs online.
Vanessa Geraghty, Founder and Principal Marketing Consultant, Vivacity Marketing
