Blog writing is on an upward trend, and there is no doubt that it will be so for quite a long time. Content creation takes many forms, and blogs are the most ingenious and one of the most successful ones. When you want to read a review or educate yourself about a topic, you google it and hit the heading that links to your question in the most accurate way. That’s just how we function now!
Did you know that there are currently more than 600 million blogs on the internet out of the 1.7 billion websites? And if you’re a marketer, here’s an interesting fact for you; 86 per cent of content marketers use blog posts as part of their marketing strategy.
All this tells us that blogs really do work! But before you walk away with this impression, it is also crucial to note that with so much content out there, it is important to rank on search engines to be noticed and take advantage of it. What is written needs to be read, and you can only do so by optimizing your content, being up-to-date, bringing quality to the table, and of course, being relevant to the audience.
In this article, we are going to have a look at how we can bring up interesting and relevant topics for the audience, and some tips and tricks. Let’s get started.
Ways to Find Blog Topics for the Right Audience
1. Analyze your audience
If you’re a regular blogger, you know the type of audience that gets attracted to your content, and if you’re new, you would want to work out the reader’s interest. niche, and likes before indulging into this.
For any business or a personal blogger, they must connect with the audience and make them linger long enough on their blog to turn it into an increased traffic on your website. Content Creation is a big part of Online Marketing. For this reason, it is estimated that businesses that publish 16 or more posts per month receive 3.5 times more traffic than those who publish fewer than four posts. You really have to pull up your socks there!
I am not asking you to create 15 blog posts in a month, but make sure the ones that you do are so near perfect and tick off all the required boxes that they contribute to the incoming traffic year after year. For this, you need to know what the audience wants to read.
If you’re a business selling a product, recognize the pain points and desires of the audience. You may have given them a survey sometime back, or have a bunch of reviews where they communicate their problems; tap into those and curate a piece that catches the attention of the consumers.
For instance, I recently came across a lot of skincare brands that flaunt their USP of having zero chemical, parabens and are completely vegan, which is an interesting take. But as a basic consumer, I have no idea why I should go for zero parabens and non-chemical products when the products I am currently using are perfectly fine. Here, you would like to dedicate blogs on focusing on why parabens is not a skin-friendly product and how it harms in the long run.
In the end, ask yourself some questions – How will the blog help them use or understand the product better? What is the problem, and how is the blog solving it? What do they want to read in your line of service/business?
When you answer these questions, you will be mirroring the want of many of your readers.
2. Interest and Expertise – Colliding them
Now once you have a good idea of what is on your consumer’s mind, do not blatantly google and start writing about. People do not want to hear the same thing in a paraphrased manner. They want something unique, something that makes them look at the situation in a different way. Uniqueness is a key point when it comes to the quality of the article.
So, how do we do it? We find the grey area.
You make a cross between your audience’s interest and your expertise and then curate the blog topic. For example, if your audience likes home decor, and you have a great deal of knowledge about colour schemes, you can curate a topic on what colours go best with rooms, lightings, moods, etc.
You have to take the most relevant topics, find your niche, collide them with your audience’s interest and make a blog post as appealing as it can be. It can be a simple How-to guide for newbies who are just discovering your product and cannot understand how to operate it, or for those rare occasions when the product does something people won’t understand quickly. You can also use informative blogs to make them trust your products better or simply work with their problems and give them a solution.
3. SEO Optimizing the result
So far, you have the audience’s expectations, your expertise, and the grey area that fits them both together. Your mind must be buzzing with ideas right now, so open a document and pour it all on it. The good and bad – we will sift through it later.
Once your ideas are on the paper, filter them to the best ones. You can exclude those which have been covered on the website and the one that is too far away from the expertise and interest.
Cutting everything down to the best blog topics, let’s now make them SEO optimized. It entails keyword research and having a look at whether you can find some more branching topics from your main idea. You can start with free tools like Ahref, Keywordtool.io and then use bigger tools like SEMRush, etc. You want to focus on search volume, competition, and relevancy.
There are other tools like BuzzSumo, Uber Suggest and many more that will give you great content ideas from the main one. You can use the ‘People also ask’ section of Google and draw in the FAQs from there. Quora is another great platform that you can make use of.
I understand for normal business, blog creation and content marketing can be really difficult. I would advise them to make use of a digital marketing experts and let experts handle the rest.
4. Dividing the Content
Now that you know how to look for blog topics that click with the audience, you should know how to approach and categorize them. If you’re starting, you would want to address the most basic question of your product/service/niche before you move onto the trending and other topics. What may seem like a really simple thing to you, might pan out to be the most traffic-bringing blog since a how-to guide never gets old. As people discover the products, they will keep coming back to the blog.
Start with Evergreen Content, something that will never fade out. A guide, a manual, a review; anything that pertains to your goods and services. You can additionally keep revising it, adding more relevant and trending keywords, posting on social media, and talking about it in your general conversations with the audience.
Then comes the Research type blogs that answer questions, solves doubts, and provides more insight into the making of the product.
Once you’ve covered the informative blogs, you can make a blog schedule with a list of trending topics, more eye-catching topics, etc, that would keep leading the customers to your website.
You can also opt for some lifestyle type blog posts to bring a human touch, but this is relative and depends on the types of consumers and niche.
As a content creator, inspiration is everywhere. Whether it is an Instagram post that you come across or an event happening in your neighbourhood, there is always something to draw from the experience and turn it into words.
Just remember that nothing happens overnight. The blog will keep adding value and numbers to your traffic, and it will be a gradual process. All you can do is keep the content up-to-date, trendy, informative, and relevant. The magic happens on its own!
