Writing great blog posts for your business can sometimes feel like doing the laundry: it’s a never-ending task. There’s a lot of pressure to constantly come up with new and unique blog ideas that will produce engaging, clickable content. We’re here to help.
We recommend setting up a centralized place to record your blog ideas so that whenever you need to fill in your content calendar for the next month, quarter, or year—you have a robust arsenal to pull topics from. So set up a Google Sheet and check out our list of nine places to find inspiration for business blog ideas.
(free) Related eBook: 130 Ideas to Rock Your Business Blog
9 Sources of Inspiration for Blog Posts
1 | Answer Your Audience’s Questions
When you’re trying to think of ideas for blog topics, your audience’s needs and interests are paramount. Don’t think about what you want to advertise to them but what they want to learn. You want your content to be clickable and rank high in search engine results, and one way to do that is to think about what questions your audience is asking. What are they searching for on Google? What problems do they have that you can resolve for them?
2 | Follow Your Competitors
Having a pulse on what your competitors are publishing is important across your organization, but keeping an eye on their content can be especially helpful for blog inspiration. Subscribe to their blog or sign up for their e-newsletter. Follow them on social media. Don’t copy what your competitors are doing, but take their ideas to the next level or use their blog topics to spark new ideas for your blog.
3 | Sign Up For Google Alerts
First, make a list of keywords that are important to your brand or line of business. Then head over to Google Alerts and enter each keyword with your email address to get daily updates on where these keywords are appearing in the news.
Pro Tip: You’ll get these Google Alerts to your inbox around the time each day that you originally requested the Google Alerts. So if your routine is to go through news right away in the morning when you open your computer, request the Google Alerts in the morning. If the Google Alerts hit your inbox at a time of day that you know you’ll be too busy to skim them, it’s likely that you’ll just send them to the trash.
4 | Find Influencers in Your Market
An influencer is a person, usually with a large online following, who has a strong relationship with their followers and can, therefore, influence their buying decisions. Not every industry has influencers, but if you’re a B2C (Business to Consumer) company, influencers can be not only a way for you to get the word out about your business through collaboration, but also a great way to keep tabs on what your audience is talking about, buying and advertising by following influencers in your sphere on social media.
5 | Gather Your Team
Don’t just rely on your creative team for creativity—gather together a larger team to brainstorm blog topics. If you have a small company, that brainstorm crew might be the whole team. Or if the whole company would be too much, consider inviting someone from each team to be sure you have insight and expertise from all areas. Hold brainstorm meetings regularly (monthly or quarterly), and think about how to make them more fun: consider have the meeting outside on a sunny day or add some food or drink to get the creative juices flowing.
6 | Ask Your Audience
If you have a large email list, consider sending out a survey. You can gain invaluable insight from your customer by asking them directly what kind of content they’re interested in reading. If you’re having trouble getting your customers to complete the survey, offer an incentive in the form of a discount, coupon, or free item.
7 | Use Social Media
If you’re reading this in the 21st century, you’re most likely a social media user yourself. Research influencers, competitors, and other websites in your sphere and follow them on social media through your personal channels. That way, when you’re scrolling through Facebook in bed every morning, as you inevitably will be anyway, you can save any interesting work-related articles you come across and take a closer look at them when you’re at the office later.
8 | Use News Aggregators and Content Discovery Tools
If you’d rather not mix business with pleasure, you can use a tool like Feedly, Quora, and Buzzsumo to pull together content from influencers and competitors plus articles featuring your chosen keywords or categories into one feed that you can organize. Skim your feeds daily for inspiration for your own blogs, as well as content discovery for reposting on your social media channels.
9 | Social Listening Tools
“Social Listening” is the process of monitoring and researching conversations in the digital spheres related to your business. There are many online reputation management tools out there that track articles and social media posts containing keywords or phrases that relate to your brand or business. Social listening can be an important tool not only for blog inspiration, but also for brand reputation management, content curation and more.
Pro Tip: No matter what strategies you try for coming up with blog ideas for your business, the most important thing is to try everything, measure, then refine. Gather data on your blog to see what’s working. Refine your content calendar and strategy to include more of the blog topics, formats, and categories that are performing well.
For more help and inspiration for business blogging, download our free eBook: 130 Ideas to Rock Your Business Blog below:
