5 Simple Ways to Generate Blog Topics Your Audience Wants to Read
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Everyone knows how important creating content is for your marketing strategy!
But let's see a show of hands...who typically gets stuck at the first step, planning picture-perfect blog topics?
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I get it! Producing high-quality content is overwhelming!
To avoid feeling stuck and to get your creative gears turning, go over these five points to ensure you generate the best content topic ideas.
Ideas to Generate New Blog Topics
1. Buyer Persona Issues
First, think about what problems your buyer persona has that your organization can solve. What tips or advice would they be searching for that relate to your services? Think about the problems your persona may be looking to solve at each stage of the buyer’s journey then map out topic ideas that solve those problems.
By doing so, your plan will include educational, informative content that helps your persona, and then your target audience will view your organization as a reputable source of information. So when they are ready to move on to the next step in the buyer’s journey, they’re more likely to have your business in their mind.
Already stuck on step one?
Download our free content workbook that guides you through the entire content planning process.
2. Google Search Console
To get an even better idea of what your website visitors search for to find your site organically, you should use the Google Search Console tool. This tool provides you with detailed reports on how your website appears on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). It will also inform you what keywords and topics your website currently ranks for and what content people click on.
With this information, you can determine what content attracts more visitors to your website and can generate topic ideas that expand on the well-performing topics so that your content can continue to be relevant and do well in the search engine rankings.
3. Content Audit
One of the main benefits of a content audit is identifying repurposing opportunities. However, it also reveals what pieces of content performed well and what topics you already wrote about. After doing a thorough audit, you can see what topics you’re missing from your content strategy and determine which topics your target audience engaged with the most. Use the content topic gaps you identify as easy ideas to generate new topics around.
For topics that performed well, think about a new spin you can put on that same topic. If your previous post was a “how-to” blog, then try writing a post about common mistakes or misunderstandings about the same subject. You’ll be providing your audience with new, intriguing information about a topic that they are already heavily interested in.
Download our free content workbook that guides you through the entire content planning process.
4. Competitors’ Content
There is no harm in looking at your competitors’ blogs for inspiration. Just keep in mind that their target audience could be different from yours. An easy way to see what pieces of content did well for them is to use a research and monitoring tool, like Buzzsumo. By typing in any domain, you can see how many times that post was shared on various social media platforms. This method will give you an idea of the types of posts their audience finds useful. You can also simply visit their blog to see what topics they frequently post about and consider if a similar topic would work in your content plan.
5. Braindump Session
A brain dump session is a great way to generate new ideas you normally wouldn’t have thought about. You can do this technique on your own or in a meeting with your team. All it requires is an uninterrupted couple of minutes, a pen, and paper.
To start, you’ll want to pick a handful of broad, high-level topics pertinent to your buyer persona or organization. Next, you or your team should write all of the ideas that come to mind around that topic for the next few minutes. The goal here is quantity, not quality. You can refine the ideas afterward, so don’t overthink your answers. When you’re finished, go over the ideas on a whiteboard or with sticky notes and elaborate on the ideas you or your team came up with.
By going through and using these five methods to generate topic ideas, you’ll ensure that you’re planning content that your target audience is searching for. Using these techniques when you brainstorm on your own or meet with your team will get the ball rolling to produce even better topics, and will also save you time in the process. Happy brainstorming!
Want to make content creation EVEN EASIER?
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We've created a free workbook that guides you through each step of the content creation process.
And this 44-page guide gives you space to fill out your organization-specific details as you follow along.
