How to Research Blog Topics
Are you looking to enhance your business’s online presence and attract more traffic to your website? One way to achieve this is through a blog! By sharing high-quality and engaging content, you can establish trust with your audience, increase brand awareness, and gain extra exposure for your company.
Blogging can be a powerful tool to connect with your customers or audience, regardless of whether you’re selling products or services. Well-crafted content can help you build a loyal readership and establish your authority in your industry or niche. Additionally, having a regularly updated blog can improve your website’s search engine rankings, as search engines like Google tend to favor websites that offer fresh and informative content.
Researching blog topics is a crucial step in creating a successful blog. Before diving into writing, it’s important to take the time to explore potential topics and gather information about them. Conducting research can help you identify popular trends, relevant keywords, and the most pressing questions or concerns that your target audience may have. This knowledge can help you create content that resonates with your readers and provides them with valuable insights and solutions. Furthermore, researching can help you avoid producing content that is already over-saturated or irrelevant to your audience’s interests. By investing time in research, you can ensure that your blog topics are not only engaging and informative but also optimized for search engines, which can help to drive traffic to your website and enhance your online visibility.
Brainstorm
The classic brainstorm can be done alone or with a team, but it’s a great way to get thinking about topics that your audience might want to read. It takes a few bad ideas to find the good ones, so note down everything you can think of and pick the best content ideas. When it comes to using brainstorming to its fullest effect, there are 4 golden rules to consider:
Quantity is everything
When it comes to the content itself, the key is quality. In fact, the importance of quality far outweighs that of quantity. At the brainstorming stage, the reverse is true. You want as many ideas as possible so that you have plenty to consider and plenty of topics to develop. Of course, you may well come up with some howlers, but somewhere you’ll also find the golden nugget.
Criticism is unhealthy
If you are brainstorming with your team, no matter how outlandish an idea may be, you need to reserve any judgement. The idea of brainstorming is to tap into that part of our brains that are responsible for creativity. Criticism of a colleague is not helpful and will just deter them from contributing any further.
Embrace the bizarre
Linking to the point above, when the creative juices are flowing it is quite likely that there are going to be some fairly strange and downright bizarre ideas appearing. Ideas for blog content are only limited by the imagination of you and your team. Let your team run wild.
Adapt and review
When you have your list of blog content ideas, the time comes when you’ll need to work through them. This is the time when you can have a laugh about some of the slightly stranger ideas and start to tweak the better ones. Making this a team effort keeps everyone on board and ensures the next brainstorming session is approached with enthusiasm.
Types of brainstorming
Brainstorming for blog content ideas can take several forms. There are some who claim that there are 20 or more approaches to how brainstorming can take place. The most popular methods include:
- Mind mapping
- 6-3-5
- Brainwriting
- Starbursting
Follow the industry
You can follow industry news, related blogs, and social media pages to find interesting content ideas. Social media is a great place for finding out what your audience really wants to know. What kind of posts do they comment on? What questions are they asking their followers? Of course, if you want to be the leader, then following isn’t enough on its own. You need to tweak and improve on any blog content ideas.
When you identify social media posts or existing blogs that have resonated with readers, you need to look at what you can add. The engagement may well suggest that, as a blog topic, the content is popular, but here are factors that you should be considering:
- Does the blog topic come with a compelling headline?
- Has the content been well written?
- Has the content been shared?
- Is the content easy to locate?
Now, you’re not going to be seeking to copy anyone’s content, but answering the questions above can allow you to approach with a view to improving. The likelihood is that your competitors will have a vast number of blog posts and often the topics will overlap with other competitors. When that is the case, what matters is who does it best!
Reviewing blog topic ideas from competitors can allow you to educate yourself. You can learn about the topics that are popular, but you can also learn to assess the content itself. This means that you can quickly look at areas where you can add something new to your readers.
Find the most searched terms
There are many free and paid programmes that allow you to search phrases to check their popularity, but one easy trick is to use Google search to start a sentence and see what people have asked most frequently. This works because Google will often show pre-filled suggestions.
For example, if I started to write the title of this post into Google, by the time I reach the third word, Google is already trying to guess how my sentence will finish. It will show several suggestions and these suggestions are things that people have already searched for. This means that people are seeking answers to these queries, making them ideal blog topics.
Using Google in this way can present you with numerous ideas for blog content, but to take it a step further, you then need to be considering keyword research. What words and phrases are your customers actually searching for? If you have a great idea for a blog, before you commit either time or money to turn it into a post, how are you going to be sure that people will even be interested? There are plenty of keyword research tools that can help you here. Some of the most popular of these include:
Your industry could see search terms being super competitive making them hard to rank for. This is a good sign that people of searching for the type of content that you want to produce, but it may mean that it will be difficult to get your blog content found. If this is the case, it is worth exploring long-tail keywords that are still highly relevant but maybe slightly less competitive.
Ask your team and customers
The sales team and customer services will be able to tell you their frequently asked questions. The solutions could be a valuable piece of content to share. Customers are often fairly vocal about what they expect from businesses, so don’t be afraid to ask them what they want.
Just asking your team may not be enough to get them fully engaged. If you want them to come forward with great ideas for blog topics then you should ensure that they are fully involved with the process. This could see it almost formalised meaning that records are kept each month. These records contain the top queries that customers have.
Your team can then review these queries and collate those that are similar. From this, they can formulate blog headlines. Making this a part of their day to day role means that you are far more likely to achieve their buy-in and make sure that they feel that their role is important.
The Importance Of A Headline
Often when brainstorming for blog topic ideas, you will find a few words are given for each idea. It could be tempting to run with these and use them as your headline. The truth is that this will more than likely be a bad idea! Yes, those few words can trigger some great content ideas, but they don’t necessarily translate into a great headline.
A great headline needs to give a clear indication of what your content is about. It needs to draw a reader in and needs to be clickable. Your blog topic research may have led you to a post that is second to none, but without a compelling headline, your hard work could all be a waste.
You can carry out a Google search and find numerous formulas to generate great headlines. There are also tools such as BuzzSumo that can help you come up with some great ideas.
Consider hot topics
Can you join in on something trending online? Are you supporting important organisations or causes? For example, what are you doing to ensure that your business is sustainable? Let your audience know what you care about. This will show the individual and company personality, as well as transparency.
If you want to be aligning your blog content with hot topics, how are you going to find what’s hot and what’s not? Here are four ways to ensure that your blog posts will be trending:
Use Twitter
If a topic is important then you can be sure that it will be all over Twitter. This social media platform is rich in terms of content ideas. If you have topic ideas already, you can carry out a search of your keywords on Twitter. If it is a hot topic, you can be sure that there will be masses of tweets that are relevant.
Google Trends
It can be useful to know what has been popular in the past, but if you are researching blog topics, you need to make sure that the topic is popular now. Google Trends can allow you to find this out. You can see real-time searches and even break searches down into sub-groups so that you can see what matters to people right now.
Make use of forums
Whereas Twitter sees people engaging about every topic under the sun, forums tend to be focused on certain niches. If you find, and join, the ones that are relevant to your industry, you will soon pick up on the conversations taking place and see which topics are hot.
Keep up with the news
It may not be everyone’s idea of fun, but watching and reading the news can keep you abreast of what matters right now. It may be that rather than news in the traditional sense, you need to take time reading industry publications. These will have articles covering topics that matter right now and may even include interaction from readers.
Consider The Presentation
The obvious way that a blog post will be presented is just like this one. There will be plenty of words to inform, but there will also be images along the way. At times images add extra detail and aid in explaining a point. At other times, pictures are there to break up the text and to make a post more readable.
However, a page of text is not always the best way to present your blog topic. The popularity of infographics has increased over recent years. These allow you to take a complex idea and present it in a simple way without overloading the reader with huge blocks of text. An infographic could be a standalone piece or it could be incorporated into your blog.
When researching blog topics, it is worth considering the images that may be available as well as if an infographic would be beneficial. Making a blog post look great isn’t just about aesthetics. It is about readability and presenting your information in the best possible way.
You Have Your Ideas, Now What?
Now that you have your content ideas, you can get them written for a fair cost by professionals. If you would like to use our popular service, you can send a copywriting order with just a title, any further ideas and any keywords that you would like featured.
Content Conga copywriters can cover anything from blog writing, product reviews, web page articles, educational articles, and more. All copywriters are UK based and orders are completed within 3 working days for up to 5000 words.