Blogging improves your website’s SEO, drives traffic to your site from social media links, and gives you credibility in your field. Inbound marketing agencies work extremely hard to write quality blog posts to their sites. But continually coming up with ideas and topics for your blog posts can be tough. Park Slope Softworks, an inbound marketing company in Brooklyn, has developed a guide on how to come up with blog post ideas, and it all starts here!
For many people, the actually writing is much easier than coming up with post ideas. If you can develop a method for generating enticing blog post ideas, you’re home free.
We recommend that business bloggers create an editorial schedule that shows what topics you’ll be covering each day or each week. Your editorial calendar can also store other valuable information: who’s writing each post, what links or images should be included, what social media posts will link back to the blog post, and due dates. An editorial calendar allows you to plan for seasonal blog posts, events and promotions, and marketing campaigns.
An editorial calendar is great, but how do you fill it with great blog post ideas?
Read Industry Blogs
When you read industry blogs, you find out what everyone else is talking about. The comments on other blogs can be as illuminating and idea-generating as the blog posts themselves. Obviously you shouldn’t steal other people’s work. That’s wrong. But you can add your voice to the conversations that are already out there and put your unique spin on topics that others are discussing.
Participate in LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups give you an easy way to connect with people who have similar interests. When you need a good blog post topic, tune in to one of your LinkedIn groups and see what they’re talking about. Ask questions, and pay attention to articles shared with the group. After blogging about a topic you found in the group, post a link to it and ask for feedback. This can be a great way to connect with new people and expand your network and visibility.
Do Keyword Research
Keyword research is huge for SEO, but did you know it’s also very helpful for coming up with blog post ideas? Every marketing agency spends tons of time researching keywords for blogging and it’s a great way to come up with ideas for the kinds of problems your customers are facing. For example, you could use a keyword tool like KeywordTool.io to research a topic like “laptop repair NYC.” Here are some of the results that could turn into good blog posts:
- Lenovo laptop repair nyc
- apple laptop repair nyc
- laptop screen repair
All of these searches rank well on Google, and they also could make good blog post topics. Check out our blog on how to research keywords to improve SEO and our Free SEO analysis.
Scan Social Media
Social media can be a goldmine for blog post ideas. Here’s one especially useful social media trick. Go to reddit and find a subreddit that relates to your blog. For example, if your business involves financial planning, you would go to /r/FinancialPlanning. Then, in the search box type the words “How do I,” and hit enter. You will come up with a host of questions that are perfect for blogging. For our example, we came up with these:
- How do I actually make money from my IRA?
- How do I combine my retirement plans from past jobs?
- How do I evaluate investment advisors?
As you can see, this is a blogging topic goldmine.
As you find your blogging ideas from various sources, plug your topics in to your editorial calendar, and you’ll never have to stare at that blank screen again. You will always have something to write about.
If you’re looking for a Park Slope Marketing Company to help with your own business blog, or for any other digital marketing question, contact us at Park Slope Softworks. We’re your NYC source for websites that don’t suck.
