We all know that content is king, and in order to stay ahead of your competitors, you need awesome badass content. But if your blog ideas seem unoriginal or mediocre, you may be experiencing blogger burnout.
You need to be passionate about what you’re writing about if you want your readers to be interested in what they’re reading on your blog. Passion fuels creativity.
Of course, old-school brainstorming can always be a great starting point, but here are a few other ways to help you create interesting content for your blog.
The tried-and-true Google:
- Search what’s going on in your industry in the news and search what people are blogging about.
- Look at Google’s hot searches and top trends and see what topics are trending. Maybe there’s something that directly relates to your business or products, or you can tie this into your business blog somehow by using news hijacking to create interest.
- Use Google AdWords to search for keywords or keyword phrases to see what’s being searched for the most in your industry to see what you should be blogging about. This is a great way to know you’re driving the right traffic since there’s a high search volume for these keywords.
For quick brainstorming:
- When you type in a keyword to Ubersuggest, it will give you related keyword topics and phrases. This can give you more wiggle room and help you think of a topic you weren’t even considered before.
- Soovle is great if you want to see top phrases related to your industry on Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, and Answers simultaneously.
For more targeted results:
- Content aggregator sites like Topsy show links, tweets, videos, and images for your search query that’s trending on Twitter. You can filter by time and type of result.
- If you want to filter by category and see the top viral content being shared on Facebook, All Things Now will show you the top results for the day, going back four days.
Answer sites are great to see what questions people are asking online that relate to your product and/or service.
- Quora is a favorite answer site because questions are usually answered by industry experts. You can also follow questions and industry topics.
- Yahoo Answers can be a good start to see what general questions are being answered. Even better if your business is able to answer peoples’ questions.
- If you’re looking for more in-depth articles for your search queries or questions, Helium is a how-to, knowledge-based blogging community.
An inside secret to setting up alerts:
Alerts are great, but they can flood your inbox, which can be time-consuming and inefficient. I like to track particular mentions on Twilert and Google Alerts, but I prefer them to be shown in my Feedly. This keeps things nice and organized. Feedly is a magazine style news reader that displays your daily feed of online subscriptions. You can organize these subscriptions into different categories as well.
To add a Google Alert to Feedly (or another RSS delivery option):
- Create a Google alert and select “Feed” instead of email.
- Click on “Feed.”
- Copy the URL.
- When you add content to your Feedly, put this RSS URL into the search box.
To add a Twilert to your RSS feed (of Feedly):
- Type in your search query. I highly recommend using search operators to narrow your search and limit unnecessary results. Choose the time and frequency of your alert.
- Select the “Publish feeds” option.
- Copy this feed URL and add it to Feedly or your RSS feed.
Creating great content around your company’s blog involves knowing what people are searching for and answering the questions people are asking. Hopefully, some of these tools and tips can help you keep the information on your blog fresh and new.
Is there a creative, unique way you ideate for your blog? Please share in the comments below!
