Content marketing works – study after study has shown that properly targeted, well written, evenly distributed content works extremely well to generate and nurture leads. The leads are higher quality. The content generates trust. It’s all kinds of awesome.
But just because it works doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy. When you discover a good blog article can drive traffic, build trust, create leads, and generally do good things for your company, naturally you want to create MORE of that goodness.
And yet, the process of actually brainstorming and outlining good blog topics can be time consuming and generally exhausting. To help, I’ve gathered seven tips I personally use when my content backlog starts to run low.
- Use This Site – http://www.impactbnd.com/blog-title-generator/blogabout – I met the folks from Impact at Inbound 2014 in Boston and they know their stuff. Content marketing at its finest, and they’ve managed to distill that into a simple to use blog topic generator that can spit out dozens of options per minute.
- Answer Questions from Your Email – If not your email, someone in customer service has a treasure trove of customer and prospect questions in their email somewhere. Get that list of questions and start writing answers. Voila, you have new blog post topics.
- Revise a Page from Your eBook – Your eBooks are filled with valuable content and there is absolutely no reason you can’t reuse them. I typically pull between 20% and 40% from every eBook I write and rewrite it to some degree and use it on a blog. Whether it’s a light revision to make it a self-contained piece or a complete revamp to fit the style of the blog, it’s a quick and easy way to create new content, and your CTA is an easy selection too.
- Call a Customer and Ask for Input – If you don’t have readily available customer questions to draw from, call one up and ask them directly for their input. Especially if you have a good relationship, this is a good way to build a stronger relationship and draw from real world problems.
- Write a Response to a Competitor’s Blog – Real quick, let me be clear that this does not mean you should borrow topics or content ideas from competitors. It almost always backfires. Rather, if you see a blog post or news article on a competitors site that you disagree with or want to add clarification too, write it as a standalone piece to show your specific take on an industry issue.
- Borrow from the News in Your Industry – Setup Google Alerts for key events in your industry. Whether it’s a product launch or an update to a specific stock index, these can be easy triggers for a quick blog post, and they are often timely, drawing a good amount of traffic.
- Break Out Bullets – You probably have a number of blog posts with bullet points in them on your site already. Instead of brainstorming a dozen more bullet-filled blog posts, take some of those bullets and create entire blog posts around them. Not only does this create ready-to-link content on your site; it builds on what you’ve already written. most readers will gladly reread the same topic with a new take or a more refined approach.
A good blog doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It provides useful content drawn from real world questions, concerns, and issues you interact with on a daily basis. Your business has a wealth of data to draw from. Take a few minutes and look to see what is available and you’ll save yourself headache and time trying to “guess” what works best.
Photo Credit: Tsahi Levent-Levi, Flickr.com
