Keeping a blog for your business can help you reach a wider audience and build stronger relationships with your current and potential customers. Keeping a blog can also help your business get found by search engines and improve your website's SEO and authority. You can keep a running list of topics that make sense for your business so that you always have ideas and information from which you can pull your blog posts, but you have to start that list somewhere, so...
How do you determine the best blog topics for your business?
Whether you blog weekly or monthly, there are several ways you can determine the best topics for your blog posts. Here's a list of five of our favorites that we use here at Silver Shade Group to create our own blog topic lists.
1. Ask Customers: If you have direct contact with your customers, you can ask them what they want to learn about. If you manage a Facebook group for your customers or survey them on a regular basis, suggest some topics and let them vote on their favorites.
2. Read Customer Emails: Look for questions that customers ask again and again. What problems do they have with your process? What questions do they have about shopping for your products or services? Chances are good that for every customer that asks a question, several others have the same question, but they don't bother to send that email. You can provide helpful information for your audience, and provide answers for people who might currently be outside your audience but asking a search engine instead.
3. Use Keyword Tools: You can look at Google's Adwords, Search Console (Webmaster Tools), or Trends to determine which words are commonly searched in your industry. Once you know what people are searching for in Google or other search engines, you can use those insights to help you determine the topics that customers want to learn about and where you can provide them helpful information.
4. Look at Trending Topics: What is your team interested in learning about? Are they on the leading edge of new technology or attending conferences around the country or the world? What are they hearing from others? This is the kind of information that you can share with your customers. They want to hear about the latest trends and the hot new topics that might be conceptual and not yet monetized. Take them through your long-term development process if that works for your business.
5. Outdo the Industry: Did your competition recently publish an article that just didn't hit the mark? Did a vendor publish a guide that customers didn't understand? Maybe they got the right theme, but the wrong topic or missed the customer perspective altogether. Write your own unique version of a popular theme that speaks to your audience. These posts will break through the barriers of your industry to help your customers with every stage of their journey through the buying process.
Hopefully you found some helpful tips that you can use to start your own blog post list.
TB