5 Tips for Developing Effective Blog Topics

Understand Your Audience

It seems simple enough, but you can’t write solid blog posts without knowing who you are writing for in the first place. 

It all comes down to understanding your target audience. You should be able to identify:

• Demographics
• Pain points
• Motivations
• Behaviors
• Trends

Only when you have a firm grasp on your core buyers or followers can you genuinely serve content that is helpful and influential.

Establish Goals

Do you know your goals for writing blog posts? It’s essential to have them because it shapes the direction of your content. 

For example, if one of your goals with blog posts is to increase brand awareness, then you want to think about the topics your audience is searching for online and how your business fits with those topics. If your business sells running shoes, then you may want to write blogs about training for a 5K or how many miles your shoes can travel before replacement. 

Here are some other types of goals that may work for you:

• Register for a webinar or training course
• Download a content piece like a white paper or guide
• Sign up for a demo or email newsletter
• Join a social media campaign or share content on social
• Learn more about the topic or a related topic

Keyword Research

Once you have a strong understanding of your audience and your goals, you will want to spend some time doing keyword research. 

Keyword research tells you whether or not people are searching for the terms, or types of blog topics, you are considering. For example, you may assume “awesome running shoes” is a popular search term, but research may reveal very few queries for that term. On the other hand, keyword research also helps you discover search terms you may not have thought of before. 

When you narrow down your keywords to those people are searching for, then you know your blogs have a higher chance of being seen online. 

Listen to Your Audience

If you think about it, your audience gives you a ton of opportunities to discover what they want to learn. Every time you speak with them over chat or the phone or email, you are getting valuable information about what’s relevant to your audience.

Social media is also a convenient platform where your audience discusses their interests, concerns, issues, challenges, and approvals. It’s where they recommend services and products to each other. If you pay attention to these signals, then you can start developing compelling blog topics you know will engage them.

Lastly, think about those frequently asked questions you hear from customers, and apply that to your future blog topic ideas.

Do you have the right skills to develop a winning content marketing strategy? Try answering these Content Marketing Test Questions and find out now.

Consider Your Assets 

Do you have videos you already created or podcasts you delivered in the past? Those assets can easily be repurposed for blog posts. Just embed them in the post and create related text to engage your readers fully. 

Now that you have some ideas for developing effective blog post topics, you can start planning your content strategy. If you want to learn more about content marketing, check out the Advanced Content Marketing Course, you can take online.