Creating custom content for your business blog is not always easy. Creating it on a regular and consistent basis is even more difficult. How do you continually come up with new topics to write about? Here is the advice we give to new inbound marketers and business bloggers.
Use Your FAQ
By itself, your FAQ is a list of questions and answers – not particularly interesting for a blog post. However, what if you explanded on each of those answers to make them into individual blog posts? These are your most frequently asked questions, so obviously these are topics your audience wants to know more about.
There might be other questions that your sales team often gets that you can include on this list. If you take a little time to think about it, you can probably come up with at least 20 blog topics from the FAQ alone. If you’re blogging twice a week, that’s nearly three months of blog posts!
Do a Google Search
Google’s search filters are great for finding blogging fodder. Take a short list of your most important keywords and search them one by one on Google. Don’t stop with the first ten search results, though. Along the top of the page, just under the search bar are filters such as Images, Maps, News, and More.
Filter the results by News and Blogs, and maybe Videos. You will see what others are writing about on the topic, and although you don’t want to write your article exactly the same way, you can take what someone else has written and comment on it (with a link to the original), dispute what they state as fact, or add your own spin on it.
Keep in mind that news articles tend to be time-sensitive, so if you want to newsjack or comment on a current event in your industry, make sure it’s done in a timely fashion.
Keep a spreadsheet of ideas for topics and include the name of the article, the URL, and any notes you have about it for future reference.
Set up Google Alerts
Have Google do the search work for you and send it straight to your inbox. Take the same keywords and create Google Alerts for each one. You can set it to send only blog posts, only videos, or everything. You can set the frequency of emails, and if you want all results, or only the best results. Look through these as they come and add them to your spreadsheet of topic ideas.
After a few weeks, you might find that some keywords aren’t producing the results you were hoping to find. You can change the keyword slightly or just delete it and try another one. As far as I know, there are no limits to the number of Alerts you can create. Just keep in mind how long you want to be spending going through the results!
Write Down Your Stories
Reading a story about how a client has a problem and how you solved it is way more interesting than the dry facts about how great your product or service is. You likely have more stories than you think about providing solutions, delighting your customers, and going above and beyond what’s expected. And your colleagues do, too.
The sales team is a great place to get stories about customers and clients. Your service or product team may have some interesting stories about, “This one time when…” or a day in the life. These stories demonstrate your expertise in a more objective tone and make it easier for the reader to relate to you or see themselves getting the same great results.
Hire an agency
Content creation is becoming more and more commonplace, but many companies still struggle to simply get it done. Yes, it can be time-consuming and there are one hundred other activities you or your colleagues could be doing instead, but that’s not an excuse to not do it.
There are writing agencies, freelance content writer sites like Zerys, and many inbound marketing agencies provide content creation and management, freeing you up to do the activities that are vital to your business.
Sigma Web Marketing offers content creation services for companies who want to get it done but don’t have the resources to do it themselves. From idea generation to writing to editing and publishing, we provide consistent, quality content that will increase visitors to your website and that your readers will love.
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