Recently, I wrote about the struggles many people experience when trying to come up with ideas for future blog posts. A common problem that I see my clients struggling with and I’d like to offer a few ways around the problem and how you can use a little online research to your advantage.

Here’s 4 simple tips to help you find topics to blog about:

1. Go Google

We all understand the importance of using keywords in online content for search engine optimisation (SEO), but have you ever thought about using those keywords as inspiration for a blog post topic? Try a Google search for a phrase you’d like your blog to rank for on the search engines. Now go to the left hand column and select ‘More search tools’ and from the new menu select ‘Related searches’. You will be presented with a list of related searches for your original keyword or phrase.

So if I put in marketing as a generic search term, I end up with about 20 related terms, such as ‘define marketing’, ‘free marketing’, ‘pr’. Just looking at this small list immediately gives me some ideas…

‘Everybody talks about how important it is, but how do you actually define marketing?’
‘Integrating PR into your marketing strategy’
‘Are you using free marketing tools to best effect?’

A great way to start bouncing blogging ideas around.

2. Use the Google Keyword Tool

Working with the Google Keyword tool is a different angle to the approach above. You’ll get a much more comprehensive list of search terms plus the relevant figures of how often a term is searched and the competition for the keyword or phrase. Watch out for those that indicate a high monthly search volume but low competition for the keyword, and then think about how you might use it to create a blog post topic. Your blog post is then more likely to rank highly and be found.

3. Wordtracker keyword questions

A perfect tool for anyone suffering from writers’ block. Wordtracker identifies the most popular questions people are entering into the search engines.

So, if I use ‘marketing’ again as my keyword the results include:
What is lead generation marketing?
What are examples of marketing tools?
What is affiliate marketing?

Any of them could be the start of a blog post and each keyword you enter gives you a list of 100 questions – try it for yourself and see what Wordtracker throws up.

4. Analyse this!

Do you use Google Analytics or the analytics embedded within your website’s back end to monitor the incoming traffic to your blog? If you notice that a particular keyword or phrase is driving traffic to your blog then it’s worth capitalising on it – think of how you can include it more and what other blog posts you can generate to develop around that theme. It’s a way of giving people exactly what they appear to want, and it’s easy to modify just through ongoing monitoring.

I know this blog post looks a little like a shameless plug for Google, but I love the fact that these tools are at your fingertips and are mostly free to use. It’s very easy to waste hours surfing the internet, aimlessly looking for inspiration when just a few minutes working with any of the tools I’ve mentioned could give you some great blog post ideas. The only problem then is having enough time to write all those fantastic blog posts!

Happy blogging! 🙂

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