How to Generate Ideas for Your Blog

Every content writer has faced the same predicament. You sit down at your keyboard and attempt to create your next engaging blog post. Then you realise that you are completely out of ideas. It happens to the best of bloggers. One thing is for sure though – any company competing for business online needs to be regularly publishing engaging and unique content that will add real value to their clients and prospects. Google is driving the need for all web content to be high quality. So for example it is critical that any blog posts does not contain keyword spamming nor duplicate content. All blog posts also need to properly researched.

Fail To Prepare – Prepare To Fail

Before you start any new blog post research the subject area . Very few bloggers are experts on every topic they write about. Conducting even a relatively small amount of research will give you a much better overview of the subject matter. You can then link to and reference some of these ‘authoritative’ online sources in your post which were discovered during this research phase. This is not only a great way to increase the quality of your blog content, it also will help you generate ideas for future blog posts.

Write for a Specific Audience

One of the best ways to generate ideas for your blog is to target the content at a specific target audience. If you can establish what interests your target market, you will be able to create engaging, relevant and useful content ideas more easily. In marketing terminology building a profile of a typical customer is usually referred to as creating a buying persona. If you keep this ‘buying persona’ in mind when you are researching and writing your blog posts it will produce much better results.

Generate Ideas

If you are still wondering about how to generate those great ideas, or indeed how to actually write a blog post, don’t worry! You are not alone, as this autocomplete screen grab from Google search highlights. If you have conducted some upfront research around the general subject matter and have a good understanding of your target audience then you can start generating specific topics to write about. These are some ideas for creating blog posts:

• Industry specific news/information
• Recent Legislation
• Published surveys relevant to your sector
• Company achievements
• FAQ’s received from clients
• Trending industry topics
• Explain a product or service you provide in more detail
• Establish a series of blog posts on one subject/issue
• Client Case studies /  testimonials

These are just some suggestions that you can use to develop blog content to keep track of all your ideas, and to ensure that you are regularly posting content, we would advise that you create a timetable for the scheduled delivery of content.

Blogging Benefits

The time and resources that you spend on creating quality blog content is worth it. It has been shown to increase a whole variety of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).  A recent survey by HubSpot found that the average business that blogs experiences:

• 55% more website visits
• 97% more inbound links
• 434% more indexed pages

compared to companies that don’t blog. The simple fact is that establishing an effective blog benefits your business.  There are many other advantages of blogging:

• Build online authority ‘though leadership’ in your sector
• Direct communication with clients
• Lead generation
• Promote your products and services

How Inspiration Can Help

As a dedicated digital marketing agency with over 15 years of Digital Marketing experience Inspiration can provide blogging services, advice and assistance. As always we want to know what you think. Have you got blogging down to a fine art? Or are you still trying to find your writing legs? Let us know your thoughts today. And if you are ever in need of a little bit of Inspiration, please do give us a call.