There are a number of articles out there about how to come up with blog topics and they all say just about the same things: talk to your sales team, check on message boards for pain points, consult social media, etc. All of these are perfectly fine ways to get inspired, but after a while even these wells can run dry, especially if you are actively posting up blog content on a regular basis. When this happens, you need to find new, more creative things to blog about. Should you find yourself in this situation, here are a few things that you can do in order to come up with blog topics.
1). Review Your Company’s Original Business Plan
I love this because what it is actually doing is asking you to reconnect to the original purpose or idea behind your brand. Read the earliest business plan (or similar documents) and look for the original ideas that were behind the inception of your company.
Take these ideas and expand upon them in a series of articles. These types of articles are especially helpful because they help to show readers what your brand is about.
2). Visit Question and Answer Sites
One of the most practical thing that a blog article can do serves as an answer to your reader’s questions. While you can tap internal resources such as your sales team in order to find what questions people are asking, it’s good to check with some external sites such as Quoraas well.
This approach provides a much more well-rounded look into your target customer’s pain points and can lead to some really helpful content.
3). Take Another Look at Your Rejected Topics
Sometimes topics don’t get written because they aren’t really relevant or interesting. Other times they aren’t written because the idea was too “out there” or too different from what has been written before.
I strongly encourage you to revisit rejected blog topics from time to time and ask yourself if each topic wasn’t written about because it was genuinely not good or if you passed on it because it was too complicated or different.
4). Consider Future Markets You May Soon Have Offerings In
Let’s say that you are an eCommerce site that sells only dog toys. If you know that you want to add dog grooming items to your offering, then go right ahead and blog about things like dog shampoo. As long as the offering is something that your readers would also find helpful and relevant, then you may as well get started writing about future offerings.
This approach is also good if you are unsure whether you want to add a new offering. By testing out content related to a product or service that you are considering, you can partially gauge potential interest in it.
5). Write About Yourself
While this can sound really scary, hear me out. Blogs that talk about the people who make up a business are great because they help present that human face to the brand. You can write short biographies that talk a little bit about an employee, what they do in a company, and why they are part of it. This approach can guarantee at least a few articles and end up being fun for the team.
I’d like to start a discussion going to talk about any other creative ways to come up with blog topics, so please share your best topic generating ideas below.
