Most of the guides dedicated to coming up with blog post ideas are missing the problem most bloggers have.
You will find suggestions like “ask your audience”, “ask your support teams” and so on – but what if you are only starting out and have no audience yet, let alone a support team?
Other blog post ideas tutorials will tell you to scrape a list of keywords related to your niche and go down that list writing a blog post for each keyword. This might work at first but it gets you to a blog full of thin, worthless SEO-content. And we told you why you should not go for SEO content.
In this guide we will give you several realistic approaches rather than specific ideas. Think these through and you will be able to come up with effective blog posts to start blogging ASAP and never miss a post.
1. Create a customer persona and follow their concerns.
You may not have any customers yet but you need to have an idea of who you think they are. Sure, this may change with time, but you need to create a customer persona.
Who are you going to write for? What is their purpose, what are their motivations, challenges, what will keep them interested?
We’ve put together a customer persona creation guide as well as a template for small businesses so check it out if you want to blog with purpose.
Once you create your customer persona, list some 10-20 Google search queries they are likely to run. See the results you get for them on Google and note news sites, blogs, and communities.
Scan those results for possible blog post topics for your own blog. Always match every idea to the customer persona profile you’ve created and try to understand if it will work well.
Online communities and forums are a goldmine for blog post ideas. People discuss things that really matter to them and you can leverage that.
2. See what your competitions does.
There are business competitors and there are SEO competitors.
On Google you may be up against a website that’s not your direct business competitor, but they still produce content relevant to your audience. Those are the best sites to establish relationships with.
Google the search phrases your customers will most likely be searching for. Identify a couple of dozens of competitors and see what they write about on
- their blogs
- their social media accounts
- in their e-mail newsletters
Chances are you will find at least 7 great blog post ideas just going through your competition.
3. Set up Google Alerts
If you have not set up Google Alerts for your brand name and some of the main search phrases in your niche – do it right now.
Google Alerts is a powerful tool that sends new mentions of topics you follow right to your Gmail inbox.
Play with the settings to get the results you need. Normally a daily e-mail with alerts will give you a great deal of ideas – you will see everything that gets posted on news sites, other blogs, forums and so on.
4. Inspect trends, news, and social media pulse.
Google Trends is another powerful tool that lets you dive deep into search queries rising in popularity.
With some niches, Google Trends intelligence will give you amazing opportunities of newsjacking (re-publishing news early enough to get referenced as a source) and social media traffic (posting a news article and spreading it on social media sites).
Switch between periods (past 4 hours, past day, past 7 days, etc.) and get all the “top” and “rising” related queries.
This is the pulse of your niche right now, navigate it and understand what your readers are searching for – or are about to search for.
Get advanced with SEO tools
SEO tools like Ahrefs or SemRush will give you a list of organic keywords that any site ranks for on Google.
The tools are a bit pricey and there is a learning curve, but if you have plenty of time you can eventually get good at identifying keyword opportunities.
Order a custom researched content plan
To make things really easy, you can order a custom content plan for your blog. We’ve been offering content plan creation services for a while and they’ve offered tremendous value to online entrepreneurs.
When you go this way you’ll get a list of researched content topics paired with SEO keywords to include into the blog post. We do all the work for you and all you’ve got left to do is send the actionable content plan over to your content contractor.
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