Once you have that blog up and running, though, you need to post there regularly. If you post once every few months, that’s not going to help your business. You want a regular posting schedule, just the same as with your company’s social media presence. There are some creative ways you can generate blog ideas if you’re coming up dry after a few months. These methods can inspire you to create new blog posts that can help your business thrive.
You Can Look at What’s Happening Within Your Niche
One way you can figure out new blogs to write is to look at what’s topical in your niche or industry. Let’s say your company helps startups. You might decide to write about startup security measures if startup security has been in the news lately. Whatever is going on in your industry, that’s what you’ll want to write about on your company’s blog. If you can also provide some outbound links to other sources within the text, that will help your business’s website from an SEO standpoint.
Ask Your Customers Via Email
It’s probably likely that you have retained some customer email addresses. If they bought something from you at some point, you should have their email address since you likely sent them a confirmation email telling them the item was coming and stipulating when it would arrive. This is how eCommerce works. You have this former customer’s email address now, and you might as well use it. They may not have told you that you can use their email for marketing purposes, but they probably didn’t forbid you from using it that way either. If hearing from you bothers them, they can always opt-out of future communications. You can make up an email address list of former customers and send them questions about what kinds of topics they’d like you to write about on the company blog. You might ask them to write in themselves what they’d like to see you cover, or you may offer them multiple options and let them pick one.
Look at Similar Blogs
There is nothing to say that you can’t use your competitors for inspiration. You might look on competing websites and see if they have a blog section. There, you can see what they’re writing about and use it as a jumping-off point. You don’t want to produce identical material to what anyone else has. However, just because you saw a topic on a competing site, that does not mean you have to write about exactly the same thing. Their blog might give you an idea for a subject similar to it, but not the same. As long as you don’t plagiarize and put your own spin on it, writing about that topic is fine.
Try to Think Like Your Customers
Maybe you feel like sending an email to your customers and asking them what they want you to write about is too intrusive. Also, you might do that a couple of times, but you can’t do it every week. You can try to imagine what your customers are thinking about and what they will most want to know. If you can think like them and put yourself in their shoes, you may be able to come up with ideas that would not occur to you if you kept thinking like a salesperson and not as a consumer.
Use Google and Look at Keyword Volume
You can also use Google Analytics if you’re trying to generate blog ideas. You can type in industry-related terms or topics and see what people are writing having to do with your niche. If certain queries or words keep coming up, you can create blog topics based on those words or searches. This way, you know you’re writing about something and posting it prominently on your blog that is almost guaranteed to send some viewers your way. You should know that once you have someone looking at your blog, the battle for them to convert is half over. Once they’re using your website, it’s much more likely they will buy something before they leave. That’s why blogs matter so much.
