3 Ways To Strategically Choose Your Next Blog Post Topic
Blogging is an incredible way to market your business. The benefits of blogging include increased website traffic (& SEO!), brand awareness, and affiliate marketing income.
Given that blogging is an incredible marketing tool – it’s important to use it strategically so you get the most out of your post. Writing a blog post that doesn’t pique your target audience’s interest can be a huge waste of time.
Here are three ways to strategically choose your next blog post topic in order to get the maximum return out of your post!
Keep reading to view all three suggestions or click the link below to bounce directly to that section.
Reverse Engineering Your Blog Post Topic
This is probably my favorite way to choose a blog post because I am a sucker for on-page search engine optimization.
If you don’t know what on site search engine optimization is – in short, it’s a bunch of best practices that website designers use to help your site show up for specific Google searches. The great thing about search engine optimization (SEO) is that it is free! You aren’t paying for ads, instead, you’re just manipulating your (in this case) blog content in a way that gives you a big thumbs up from Google.
Reverse engineering your blog post works by choosing a blog post topic based on SEO keywords. So instead of coming up with an idea and trying to format it in an SEO-friendly way, you’re using SEO keywords to choose the topic for you. It takes a lot of the pain out of trying to figure out what the hell to write about.
To reverse engineer your blog post topic, we’ll use Google Keyword Planner – a free tool helpful for finding what people are searching online. (Then, we can use those search terms to figure out what people want to read about!)
Once you are logged in to your Google Keyword Planner, go to “discover new keywords”. From here, we can put in broad terms about our business and Google will narrow down the keywords for us.
For example, if I owned a skincare company I could type in, “acne”, “skincare”, “facial cleanser”. These are just general skincare terms that I pulled out of thin air. (Try switching them up a bit for new keyword ideas for each blog post.)
We’ll click “get results” and Google will come up with a number of keywords for us. These are words and phrases that people have typed in to Google that relate to your broad terms.
You’ll notice that there is a “competition” word next to each result. These range from “low” to “high”. High competition keywords/phrases are more difficult to rank for because everyone is trying to show up for those results. It’s in our best interest to use a keyword/phrase that has a low competition.
Some examples of low competition results for our skincare query are: “types of acne”, “zit on lip”, “acne during ovulation”.
We can take this information that Google has just provided for us and turn those keywords into a blog post. We now know people are searching for those words, and we know that there isn’t a lot of competition for those words, so it’s the perfect topic for a blog post!
The only thing left to do is figure out how we can position our (fake) skincare brand as relevant to those terms. Maybe our skincare brand makes facial products. We could write a blog post about lip zits: what causes them, the science behind them, and then also provide our acne treatment cream as a solution for fighting the zit-lip problem!
Bam! Now we have a blog post idea based on what the world WANTS to know about.
Teaching While Learning
Teaching while learning is exactly what it sounds like. Any time you learn something new about your business field, write down what you’ve learned as a blog post. Share the knowledge!
This is the method I chose when writing about how to properly size a Facebook cover photo. I had a problem, I needed to solve it, I learned how to solve it, and then I wrote a blog post to help others solve that same problem!
I’m sure you’re probably thinking, “But I learned it from the internet – there’s clearly already that information available online. Why should I make a blog post about what I’ve learned?”
Here’s the truth though: almost everything online is just repeat information. It’s not about being the first person to ever present an idea. It’s about being the person who presents that idea to your audience. An article written about constitutional law intended to be read by lawyers is going to be filled with waaaaay more complicated words than an article written about constitutional law written for the average citizen. Both articles contain the same information – but they are written for different groups of people.
So let’s go back to our fake skincare company that we talked about in the last section. Maybe we own this skincare company and have just learned that most skincare products contain Chemical A – but our company doesn’t use that chemical in our products. We do a lot of research to figure out what Chemical A is and why it is typically added to skincare products. We find out that it dries out skin in order to treat oily complexions.
Well, now we can turn around and write an article all about Chemical A – what it is, what it is used for, why skincare products have it, why we recommend against it, why our company doesn’t use it in your products, and so forth.
Just compile all the information you’ve learned and post it for your audience!
(But obviously, make sure you’re writing everything in your own terms because plagiarism is bad.)
Frequently Asked Questions
This one is the easiest because your audience will give you the blog post topic!
As a website designer, I get a ton of questions that range from, “What is hosting?” to “How do I turn on my computer?”
Now, I could answer every single email question with a personal response and spend hours answering the same question over and over again…
…or I could make a blog post and direct my clients to that post. This is a win-win for me because:
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- I don’t have to answer the same question repeatedly
- Every time a client goes to my blog for their answer, my search ranking improves!
So it’s actually beneficial to my website’s rank for me to send my client a blog post instead of an individualized email.
If you are struggling with what to write next, start with any questions you are frequently asked from past customers.
Now that you know how to choose strategically choose your blog post topic – get writing!
