How to Come Up With New Blog Topics Your Visitors Want to Read
In today’s world, you can’t have a successful website without a blog. You need a blog with plenty of content to get ranked in the search engines. If you don’t rank in the search engines, you’ll have a difficult time driving targeted traffic. If you can’t get targeted traffic, you won’t get enough conversions or sales.
While having a blog is critical to your success, you can’t just publish general content and call it a day. Website visitors are tired of boring, general blog posts about subjects every other website has covered.
Are you struggling to come up with blog post ideas? Here’s how to come up with fresh, creative topics your visitors want to read.
1. Read top-rated industry blogs to get ideas
For a steady flow of new ideas, start reading top-rated industry blogs. You’ll probably get ideas just by reading the headlines, but read some of the content as well. You might not be inspired by the headline, but will find a paragraph particularly interesting. Sometimes writers barely touch on an interesting topic that you could easily expand into a full article.
A word of caution
Be careful not to plagiarize content, even headlines. Article headlines aren’t subject to copyright laws, but you should still come up with unique headlines.
Imagine a user searches Google for your keywords and the first page of search results turns up ten articles with the same title. Which article will the user click on? Your guess is as good as any.
Now imagine that nine articles share the same or similar title, while your title is unique and compelling. That’s how you get clicks from search results even when your content is similar.
2. Add fresh insight to general topics
There is a benefit to publishing general information on your blog as long as you add something new.
When website visitors like your site, they’ll start to browse around and if they like your content, they’ll be curious to know what you have to say about general topics in your industry. If your writing is compelling, they’ll want your unique take on standard topics. If you can provide some fresh insight, a general subject won’t seem so general.
For example, the Los Angeles Property Management Group published an article outlining four common move-out inspection mistakes landlords make. While three of the points are commonly known, one point isn’t. The article suggests not conducting a final walk-through with the tenant. Instead, the article recommends doing the walk-through alone or with the property management team to avoid being misled by temporary cover-ups and pressure from the tenant.
By covering basic information for curious visitors and adding fresh insight, your content will appeal to a wider audience. Just don’t make general information your go-to strategy to meet your blogging deadlines.
3. Look for uncommon problems to solve or questions to answer
One of the best ways to come up with new content is to look for problems to solve within your industry. For example, if you’re a plumber, you’ve probably covered all the common plumbing situations people encounter. However, if you look hard enough, you’ll find some situations that may be more common than you think. For instance, some people don’t know it’s best to use hot water while running a garbage disposal, or that running hot water while pouring grease down the drain isn’t a good idea.
If you look hard enough, you’ll find people with obscure problems and questions in your industry. Writing about solutions to these problems will generate more interest in your blog and keep readers happy.
4. Read reviews from your industry
An interesting way to get content ideas is to read reviews from your industry. Check out Amazon, Yelp, and any other review site you can find to see what people are talking about. Is there a common problem people face that isn’t being solved by existing products? Even if your product doesn’t solve the problem, you can write articles that address the issue and ask readers to comment on how they would like to see the issue resolved.
Reading reviews will give you an idea of what’s happening in your industry, where other companies are either falling short or excelling, and how you can help.
5. Use online tools
There are plenty of online tools that will generate topic ideas for you in a variety of ways. Sometimes all you need to do is use a blog topic generator or find out what’s trending in your niche using Google Trends.
Keep the ideas flowing
With so many tools at your disposal, you’re not likely to run out of ideas for a long time. The key is coming up with an irresistible title to get those clicks.
