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7 Ways To Develop Relevant Blog Topics

 ideas for relevant blog topics

 

One of the biggest challenges of blogging is not blogging at all, but coming up with an idea to blog about. Yes, I write for a marketing blog, so obviously I write about marketing topics. I also write a ton of content for clients, all with a very wide range of posts.

My goal is to ensure that my clients are blogging so that they are establishing industry credbility, increasing their domain authority, and increasing their search engine ranking. At some point, it feels like everything has been covered. Over the years of my experience as a marketerr, I’ve devised a few tricks to keep blog topics fresh. Below are seven ways I come up with new ideas for interesting blog articles.

Read Old Posts

There are countless blogs on the Internet, and there are countless topics for each blog. Each post has at least one idea in it that can be written about in further detail. For example, one of my clients regularly writes articles about transportation and fleet maintenance. It's not the sexiest topic to write about, but it's important to create value for people reading these articles. I've found success in looking at what the transportation industry as a whole has created, and then shaping my topics off those already-written articles. 

You can do this in a few different ways, but my favorite method is to look spcifically at Google Search Results. Looking at results for relevant keywords or phrases from 2015 or 2016, and evaluate if any of that content is outdated or no longer relevant. If you can find inaccuracies, make a point to create a post about those inaccuracies.

Read Other Relevant Blogs

One of the first places I go to create blog topics is to the websites of my client's competitors. If one of them has a good library of content, you can bet your butt that I'll be looking for good blog topicson their publication. Reading these other blogs not only gives you different ideas of what to write about but also educates you on things you likely don’t know.

In addition to the blogs of your competitors, it's critical to keep up with industry related blogs. This will help you come up with ideas to write about while also to keeping up with industry trends.  

Ask Colleagues for Ideas

While I’m cheif editor and content creator for most all my clients, I’m certainly not the only writer and I’m also not a dictator.  Oftentimes people have things they’d like to write about. I do my best to foster an environment that allows other people to contribute to our blogging efforts. When people write with authenticity, the articles tend to be better. (It also makes my life easier because it’s one less topic I have to come up with!)  

Expand Your Horizons

Not every post needs to be relevant to your most important persona or your primary business avenue. Your readers will thank you when you entertain or educate them (or both) with a post here and there about something relevant, but in a lighter in tone.  For example, are both relevant, but they’re also light hearted and not as educational as most of the blogs on our site.

Have A Brainstorming Session

Once a month, our SEO team comes up with a list of keywords that content marketers can easily turn into blog posts. When basing your topics off of keywords, you're ensuring that the article will be found though organic search results. Of course, we also come up with a lot of inane ideas, but that’s the point of a brainstorming session. 

Consider SEO Keywords

Coming up with topics based on SEO keywords is both necessary and dangerous. Necessary because you want to rank for certain terms on Google and blogs are a great way to add to your page rankings. Dangerous because if you try to force your keywords too often into your content, it’s going to make your posts not only unbearable to read, but also Google will pick up on it and actually lower your rankings. 

Try to naturally use your keywords in your articles.  For example, if you’re a cartography company, you might have a long-tail keyword such as “regional topographic hiking maps”.  You can easily put this in a post in a sentence in a post about topography, but it wouldn’t make sense if you’re writing about navigational aids for ferry pilots.   

You should have a list of SEO keywords that you can write articles about, which should give you various relevant topics to choose from.

Use an Idea Generator

Just Google “blog idea generator” and a plethora of them will come up.  A few that I’ve used in the past are HubSpot's Topic Generator and Portent's Title Maker. Sometimes the topics they come up with are amusing and nothing you could ever write about, but if you open your mind past the topics that these generate they will guide you to something worth writing about.

Don’t waste time with writer’s block anymore.  Give these ideas a try and keep your blog fresh and relevant.  If you’re still struggling for ideas, contact us here at Revenue River Marketing; we’re experts in inbound campaigns and can help you execute flawlessly.  

 Intro to SEO, Denver Marketing Firm, Revenue River