Coming Up with Blog Post Ideas

Coming-up-with-blog-post-ideas

If you’ve been keeping up with our blog posts, you know that we strongly advocate starting a blog of your own. The fact is, if you want to see your website ranking higher in search engines, then you need to be contributing regular, fresh, high-quality content to your site to stay in Google’s good graces. But it doesn’t just help with ranking, of course. Blogging can help you stay caught up in your industry’s trends, as well as help you network with other professionals in your field.

But the inevitable problem with writing regular blog posts is that you’ll eventually feel like you’ve talked about everything there is to talk about! After you’ve hit this roadblock, how do you overcome it? Do you take a break? Hire someone else to write for you?

No! Don’t give up just yet!

Coming up with blog post ideas doesn’t have to be difficult. With practice, you’ll get better at finding topics from almost any resource. But if you need some ideas now, we’re here to help. And the best part of all of these ideas is that they’re completely free! What more could you ask for?

Think of a question you’ve had lately.

This might sound obvious, but it can be one of the simplest answers to your topic dilemma! Chances are that you’ve had a question about something in your industry—even if you’re an expert—and you did some research to come up with an answer.

Well, the general rule of thumb is that if you have a question, someone else will too. And the best way to really learn something is to teach it to someone else. What better way to do that online than come up with an informative blog post?

Let’s try an example. If you’re a fencing contractor, maybe you’re wondering about the best way to deal with an early frost. (I’m not a fence expert, so if this is really obvious, please forgive me—I’m just trying to illustrate a point!) After doing some research, you come up with an answer. Now why don’t you write a blog post about your new-found knowledge and tell your customers how they can prepare for frost, deal with frost, or make sure their fences stay safe throughout the winter? There are a lot of topics you can come up with just by thinking about this one question.

customer-service

Have your customers asked you for help with anything?

This is somewhat related to the above point, but it’s from a customer’s point of view. There’s something called the “curse of knowledge” when you’re writing your own content. It works like this:

You are the expert on the subject you’re writing about. This means that you have an advantage over your audience, especially if you’re writing how-tos or informational posts about your area of expertise. This can blind you to your audience’s level of understanding. You could be skipping over information you deem obvious, when it isn’t obvious at all to your readers. Or you could be using terminology they’re not familiar with because you don’t even think twice about your verbiage, but they are not industry insiders, and therefore don’t know the lingo.

So if your customers have come to you with questions that you think are too simple or dull to warrant a blog post, think again. You might have a great opportunity to really go the extra mile for some of your customers by simply writing a short blog post!

Seasonal events are an easy go-to.

Especially for contractors and retail stores. Are you running a seasonal promotion? Write about it. Do you have ideas why your products and services would make great gifts? Sell yourself in a blog post. Are there spcial weather-related or season-related events that could impact your business? Let your customers know.

Our fencing contractor could write about how to protect different kinds of fences from sleet and snowdrifts. A clothing boutique could talk about how their clothes make great holiday gifts. Even a pool contractor—someone who works primarily during the summer months—could post helpful articles about how to care for a pool in cold weather, or pitch spas and hot tubs instead!

Do a search in Google trends.

See what is going on around the web by doing a Google Trends search. Now, you may not have a particularly interesting or newsworthy profession—maybe you do demolition, for example. (Sorry, demolition experts!) Plug some terms into trends and see if people are searching for your topic. If they are, run a Google search yourself and see what recent news articles pop up. For example, let’s run demolition through Google Trends:

demolition-google-trends

As you can see, it’s a pretty steadily searched topic. Now let’s run a Google search:

demolition2

That red arrow is pointing to a pretty interesting article. Maybe you can get some ideas from that topic and incorporate them into your own post! It’s easy to do when you have inspiration that’s already being provided by other content creators.

Check Quora.

Quora is a place where people go to ask questions, and then other Quora users will answer these questions. Just like with Google Trends, you can find things people are asking about. This doesn’t mean you have to answer the questions (unless you’d like to!), but you can use these queries as a way to come up with blog posts. Oftentimes, users will be asking simple questions that you, as an expert, know the answers to. By reading through the existing questions, you’ll know what people are wondering about without having to conduct a survey or tally up customer questions.

All of these ideas are completely free and easy to do. Even if you’re not super blog-savvy, you can certainly improve your content creation by taking the time to learn a few of these tricks. After all, coming up with blog post ideas shouldn’t be a terrible chore!

We hope these tips have been helpful for you and wish you luck with your blogging endeavors! If you have any other ways of coming up with topics, please let us know in the comments below!

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