Know your audience, think about your reader, and write what they are interested in reading. Simple advice, right? But for most of us, it is very difficult to do. Even if you know your audience well, looking at a blank sheet of paper (or empty Google Doc) can be overwhelming. It’s one reason why marketing managers push blog content to the bottom of their to-do lists.
Here are 10 ideas to keep your blog fresh and your traffic, leads, and conversions flowing.
1. Ask Your Customers What They Need Help With
You want to solve your customers’ problems, right? Then you need to know what they want help with. So, ask them. Send an email to your customers or create a post on social that asks, “what’s keeping you up at night?” Their responses can be great content generators, and we all know that customers love to be heard.
2. Use Your Analytics
You don’t need a custom data dashboard to use your data. We all have Google Analytics (if you don’t know how to interpret your analytics, check this out), email data, and social media data through native platforms. Identify what’s most popular and look for common threads that you can replicate in future blogs.
3. Try Something New, Then Blog About It
Are you about to run your first webinar? Or maybe you’ve just embarked on a digital advertising campaign to generate leads for a relatively new product? Write about it! You can do a short post complete with pictures and CTA details, or you can turn it into long-form content and tell people what you learned. You could even create a step-by-step guide, which you could then introduce in a blog post.
4. See What Other People Are Talking About
I get a lot of ideas from reading other people’s content. Keep an eye out for potential material when you’re scrolling through your social feeds, reading blogs, and even listening to podcasts. Make sure to write those ideas down! By keeping a running list, you’ll never have a truly blank piece of paper to start with.
5. Reshare Best Tips from an Industry Leader
Who do your clients look to as leaders in their industry? Mine their content for tips or best practices that you can reshare with a comment or bonus tip from your team. Make sure to give full credit to the original authors and tag them so they can comment back.
6. Create a Guide
Everyone loves tips and tricks that make their work lives easier. Guides – sizing guides, for-beginners guides, how-to guides, lead-generation guides, growth guides – keep people coming back. They offer helpful information that your clients can reference over and over again. Here is an example of a guide that is popular on TMC’s site.
7. Don’t Forget About Visual Content
Text alone isn’t enough to keep your blog readers coming back. You need to mix it up with other formats. If you have a video, post it to your blog and note some key points. Consider a sharable infographic with a short text explanation, or include an image gallery. If you have a podcast or host a recorded event, post the transcripts. It’s great SEO fuel.
8. Develop Process Posts
In the B2B world, one of the most successful types of blogs is the “process” post. A process post is when you describe how to do something. How to hire more qualified employees. How to use data to reach a certain goal. And yes, even how to come up with blog topics! At TMC, we field questions like “how do I get more return from my social media?” We answered that question with a blog while providing readers with information they can use.
9. Use a Blog-Title Generator
This is just a fun way to brainstorm blog titles and ideas. HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator generates topics based on minimal direction, enabling you to turn that idea into something specific and actionable. There are many title generators out there. Just search online to find them.
10. Write a Top 10 Post Like This One
Quick-hit lists are very digestible and helpful to your clients. They also make for great slide shares on social sites such as LinkedIn.
Writer’s block hits us all from time to time. Ideally, these tips will help you move from a blank piece of paper to a blog that engages your audience and supports your sales and marketing efforts. We’d love to hear how you generate content topics. Comment below — and don’t forget to read more topics on our blog to get more ideas for yours.
