How to come up with blog ideas for your business[ 6 min read ]

We all lack inspiration sometimes, especially if writing copy is not really your thing and you’d rather be doing something else entirely. Or perhaps you’re a year or so into writing blogs and you’ve now run out of ideas for engaging articles.

Whatever your situation, here are some of our top tips on coming up with some blog topic suggestions.

If your customers regularly ask the same questions then use these queries to help to write blog titles as it’s probably something many people are searching the answer to.

For example, if you’re a heating engineer, you may get asked how long a boiler takes to install – there’s an easy blog subject right there; “how long does a boiler take to install” or “What steps are involved in a boiler install” etc.

Start by making a list of questions people are asking during your day to day interactions and then expand on them to make a blog post. You could even ask your social media audience, or customers directly, if they want to know the answer to anything specific.

If you think about it, one question might lead to more than one blog post – this is where mind-mapping comes in useful. There are loads of free online tools for mind-mapping but the easiest way is the old-fashioned paper and pen way!

If your competitors are already writing blogs, see what they’re writing about – especially if they’re doing better in the market than you are. Obviously, you don’t want to directly copy your competitors, as that’s plagiarism (note too that Google frowns upon duplicate content) but it might spark your creative juices and help you come up with some topic ideas for blogging.

Do check your facts before blindly writing about something, even if you think you’re correct – and don’t be afraid to write about an opposing view, either. For example, “many people say you should do X but we think it’s better to do Y”. These types of posts can sometimes generate conversation and people sharing your content.

Your customers come to you for a reason – usually it’s because you can resolve their pain points in a way that suits them (either at the right price, efficiently, fuss-free, convenient location etc). If you can make a list of those pain points, and how you look to solve them, that story or case study often makes a great blog.
For example, “How we helped a customer do X and solve their Y problem”.

Regular case studies are an easy way to write regular content for your website instead of blogs/news as you can use a set template saving time gathering the information – and you’ll be writing about what you know about. Bonus points if you get their location in there as that helps with local SEO.

If you’re going down this route don’t forget to get the client’s permission if you’re using their name, and see if you can get photos along the way. A quote from them is like gold-dust, if they’re happy to provide. And, send them a link to it afterwards so they can share it out to their network as well.

Websites like Answerthepublic and Google trends, or social media trending hashtags can help you see what people are searching for and talking about.
Answer the public lets you put in a term and it will suggest some ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions that go with it – practically writing your blog titles for you.

Google trends will show you related terms and what the traffic is like for those terms over any given time period – there’s no point writing a blog about halloween sweets in May, for example. But you can get ahead of the trend by posting it in late August.

Social media, especially twitter, has the ability to show you what hashtags are currently trending – keeping an eye on them might show you ‘hot topics’ that you can take advantage of if you have time to quickly get some content out.

And, thereisadayforthat will show you if there are any upcoming ‘national day of’ that relate to your business genre.

If you’ve really come to the end of your inspiration, consider hiring a copywriter, an SEO consultant or brand specialist.

A copywriter will be able to generate some topics for you, and even write the blogs, freeing up your time to concentrate on other things.

An SEO expert will be able to do some keyword research for you to find out what keywords and phrases you should be adding to your website to increase traffic.

And, a Branding expert will help you define your target audience and establish what types of content they’d be likely to be interested in.

Of course, here at The Smart Bear, we have all three available to you, and we have a 5 minute content fix service where we can generate 5 blog topics for you for just £5 – saving you hours and sparking your creativity along the way. Get in touch via the form below if you need our help.