How To Pick The Right Blog Topics

Welcome to the second blog post in our series designed to help local businesses attract new customers and keep current customers interested during the COVID-19 outbreak.

If you haven’t read the first post in our series, you can click below to check it out!

Business Blogging: How To Get Started

Our previous blog post explained the steps every business should take before launching a blog and gave you the tools you need to create a plan for your business blog. Once you’ve completed that step, you’re ready to start planning the content you want to share on your blog.

For most people, this is the hardest part – deciding what to write! There is a lot of content already out there, so we want to make it easy for you to find the best blog topics that will appeal to your target audience.

3 Tips For Choosing The Best Blog Topics

If you want your target audience to read your blog and find it valuable, you need to be creative and select the right blog topics. If you don’t take the time to brainstorm and map out the ideal potential topics for your business blog, you’ll end up wasting your time writing content people don’t actually read!

Choose Topics That Are Relevant To Your Audience

Just because you may find a topic interesting, doesn’t necessarily mean your target audience will feel the same way. It’s important to put yourself in the mind of the people you’re trying to reach with your content and write about topics that will be valuable to them.

Need help identifying your target audience? Hubspot makes it easy with free buyer persona templates.

If you aren’t sure if a potential topic is the right fit for your audience, start by asking the following questions:

1. What are they interested in? 
2. Are they facing any problems you can solve? 
3. What unique challenges are they trying to overcome? 

If your potential blog topic aligns with the answers to any of these three questions, then you likely have a topic your audience will resonate with.

The best way to write and share content that is relevant is to identify the needs of your target audience. Once those are clear, simply create content that provides solutions and meets those needs. Your blog content will be relevant as long as it helps your readers solve real problems.

Check Out The Competition

One of the best ways to start brainstorming potential blog topics is by seeing what your competitors are doing. Are any of them sharing blog posts? Are any other companies in your general industry sharing content?

I do want to be clear: I am not suggesting you steal content or intellectual property from anyone! However, researching the competition is an important part of the process. 

Start by making a list of at least 5 blogs you like in your industry. Take some time reading through the blogs and noting what it is that makes their content stand out. Is it engaging headlines? Maybe they feature guest experts that share unique experiences. Are they giving away valuable resources for free?

Example

One of my favorite marketing blogs is run by Hubspot. They’re not really a competitor, but they do provide some services that are similar to 1Eighty Digital. I regularly read their blog to see what topics are trending and see if there are any new ideas I can write about in a way that would help our audience.

Skimming through their recent blog posts, my notes usually look something like this:

• Offer clients free resources to help them plan their annual marketing budget?
• Highlight what has chanced with SEO techniques in 2020
• Does our audience care about marketing trends?
• What can we give our audience that helps them come up with better email subject lines?

Create a list of blogs that you regularly read to help you brainstorm creative topics and ways to present them for your own blog. Just be sure you don’t steal actual content from other businesses!

Use Content Tools To Help You Brainstorm

There are a ton of online content tools out there designed to help you come up with blog topics when you’re stuck. If you haven’t checked out BuzzSumo yet, it’s a great way to find topics and ideas based on keywords and see what kinds of topics are performing well.

Blog Topic Generator is another tool from Hubspot that can help you brainstorm blog topics and headlines. All you need to do is type a noun into their search engine!

You can also regularly visit online forums like Quora or Reddit to see what types of questions are being asked by your target audience. Questions your company can answer are the best way to come up with ideal topics for your blog. You can also check your own social media channels and ask your employees if there are questions your customers are regularly asking.

No matter what topics you land on for your blog, remember to always focus on how this blog topic will help your ideal audience solve a problem.

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