How To Come Up With Quality Blog Content Ideas
Whenever I start working with my coaching clients on their content strategy they all start off worrying about the same thing: blog content ideas. The problem is that there’s too much choice – with seemingly everything in the whole world available as a topic to write about we are paralysed by all the options, while our peers and influencers doing really cool things with their content turns our heads and makes us think ‘maybe I should be doing that…’. All the noise makes it hard for us to focus on building our lane, not to mention staying in it once we’ve made it.
When I began transitioning my content from pure lifestyle blog to a marketing focus this was a problem I came up against too. My early business content is a little all over the place; I wrote about what I was inspired by that week and there wasn’t a whole lot of rhyme or reason to it. I knew that I needed to treat this content differently and be more strategic about it, so I developed an ideation process that has seen be get really focused about what I’m writing and maintain a high quality across all my content. Now, we go through this process in more detail on my blogging for business course Campfire, but in this post I’m going to walk you through it and give you some actions to start working on today.
Narrow your focus
The first thing we have to do is narrow in your focus and niche down. This doesn’t mean to say you can’t open up to other topics at a later date, but especially if you tend to be magpie-ish with your content clear boundaries is really important to start off with. But how do you decide your boundaries?They need to come from your brand, and what it is you want to build. Ask yourself what you want to be known for and how you can best help your audience; think about what your brand stands for, and pull these ideas into 3-5 categories that you feel represent you. So, for example, I have the categories of Simple Marketing, Simple Working and Simple Living – if an idea doesn’t fit clearly into one of these categories I know it’s not focused or on-brand enough, so I go back to the drawing board with it.
Create for your audience
Your categories give you a framework to start thinking about ideas; when it comes to the ideas themselves, we need to think about our audience. When your blogging for business, your blog needs to be focused on serving and providing value for your customers. Your blog is there to get them to your site and keep them there exploring, and to help them understand and fall in love with your brand. None of those things are going to happen if the content isn’t valuable to your customer.
So get really focused on what your customer may want to read. Think about what they want to achieve and help them get there, think about what’s holding them back and help them overcome it. Look at other bloggers and influencers that your customer followers and create content that contributes to a wider conversation, or simply think about what your audience is searching for and write about that.
Think About Your Customer's Journey
There is a compulsion to create blog content that is very product-focused or talks about the features and benefits of working with us – we feel we want to make a sale off the back of a blog post in order for it to be valuable. But if you’ve ever been on a business blog like that then I bet you didn’t stick around very long.
It’s helpful to think of your blog in terms of the customer journey. Although we all spend time getting to know our ‘dream customer’ it’s easy to forget that they change and shift as they move through our business. If someone has just found your blog post on Google and come to the site for the first time, they have very different needs and a very different mindset to when they’re reading your sales page for the fifth time as they make a purchasing decision. Your blog needs to cater to your customer along each stage of this journey, and help move them through it quicker.
So a blog post about ‘how to create a terrarium’ might seem too general and unlikely to drive sales; what it will do, however, is drive traffic and introduce new customers to your site and brand. At that stage of their journey, just exploring the idea of terrarium, anything salesy will just put them off. Once their on the site, you can start leading them through more content that will bring them closer to buying – so a post of ‘our favourite terrarium plants’ and then ‘the new terrarium collection’ that links to products.
Some actions for you to take:
Decide your 3-5 on-brand blog categories
Think about your audience and write down all the things they might be searching for or would be interested in within your categories
Start forming ideas for blog posts – come up with titles and see how many times you can break down or re-use ideas to get the most possible (I once got 50 titles in one sitting…)
Create a customer journey map – create a map of how customers find your business and how the travel through it on their way to making a purpose. Think about how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking at each point, and create content that speaks to that
