In todays blog I’m going to show you how to build a powerful blog strategy to compliment your digital marketing efforts.
Before we get started I just want to reiterate that blogging is not dead.
There are more than 600 million blogs and it’s become very saturated over the past 5-10 years but that does not mean blogging doesn’t work anymore. It just means you need a solid strategy and good content to succeed.
The great thing about writing a blog is that you can also repurpose the content into:
- Video content
- Social media posts
- Infographics
- Email content
- Podcast fuel
- etc
One piece of content can go along way especially when you have a solid strategy in place.
Purpose
Before you get started with putting together a strategy and list of blog idea’s really think about the blogs ‘purpose’. What do you want your blog to achieve?
For the most part it’s probably to help with SEO but you might also want to supply consumers with more information, guides on your products, FAQ’s or you might just have a burning passion for a particular topic and you want to share that with others.
Once you have aligned your purpose we can dive into some ways to generate lots of titles & ideas to feed into your content calendar.
That’s all the strategy needs to be really a planned list of titles for each month built through research & inspiration.
Keyword Research
The first thing we are going to cover is keyword research. This is the process of finding out what people are searching on search engines (usually Google) and how many times it gets searched a month.
Using keyword research you can find potenial blog title idea’s and topics to write about, below are some keyword research tools that you can use to help you out.
1. Google Ads Keyword Planner
Google Ad’s Keyword Planner is free to use but you might have to enter some card details (which you can then remove) to get started.
Head over to Tools & Settings and click Keyword Planner under Planning.
Click ‘Discover New Keyword’ and enter a topic or keyword that’s relevant to your business or blog.
You will then be presented with a huge list of keywords with information on how many times the keyword is searched each month. This should provide you with get topic and blog idea’s from the get go.
You can also search things like ‘how to’ ‘tips’ ‘blog’ followed by your topic to find more suggestions or try using CTRL / CMD F to search for these things amongst the list as well.
- Digital Marketing Strategy
- Restaurant Digital Marketing
- Digital Marketing for Doctors
We can then turn these keywords into powerful blog titles (more on this later).
Here are some other useful keyword research resources:
What are your customers asking?
As well as finding out what people are researching and interested online how about finding out what your ACTUAL CUSTOMERS want?
Here’s some super simple & actionable ways you can locate this information:
- In Facebook or social media groups
- On forums like Quora or Reddit
- Questionnaires
- Ask them directly
- For a more advanced method you can use website site search data to find out what your customers are asking providing you have a search function on your website.
Scope out the competition
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, check our your competitor blogs or if you don’t know who these companies are try searching ‘topic* blog’ or ‘topic* company’.
Have a look at what your competitors are posting to gain inspiration and ideas. You can even model what they have done but make it 10x better.
Brian dean from Backlinko calls this the ‘Skyscraper Technique’ where you take an existing piece of content and improve it by adding infographics, images and extra useful content and basically make it your own.
Putting it all together
So far we have discussed ways to help inspire you with blog & content idea’s. Next all you need to do it set a target for how many blogs you are going to produce a month. (One a week is easily manageable) then put together a list of topics / potenial title idea’s for each Month.
Bear in mind seasonal events & holidays such as Christmas, Valentines day & Mother’s day when putting your list together as you might want to produce tailored pieces of content around these events – AGAIN USE KEYWORD & OTHER RESEARCH METHODS TO COME UP WITH GREAT IDEAS AROUND THESE DATES.
Creating amazing blog titles
The best method for creating a sexy blog title is to first just write down a rough draft title, now if you are stuck on a specific topic try writing down 3 drafts to throw some idea’s around. For instance:
Topic – Intermittent Fasting
3 random title idea’s:
1. – Intermittent Fasting For Beginners
2. – Ways to do Intermittent Fasting.
3. – How To Do Intermittent Fasting
Once you have a rough title make sure to keep it accurate, if you’ve written ‘complete guide’ but it’s only a 800 word article you are misleading people and your engagement metrics will suck!
Next you need to jazz it up by doing some of the following:
- Use strong language
- Use alliteration
- Make it visual
- Make the value clear
- Make it personal
For instance:
1. – Intermittent Fasting For Beginners – Should you Skip Breakfast?
2. – 6 Popular Ways to do Intermittent Fasting.
3. – The Ultimate Guide to Intermittent Fasting.
Super simple!
That’s it folks, hopefully now you have learnt some ways to generate topic and content idea’s for your blog and you can also throw some amazing & actionable article titles around too! 😉
TL;DR
- Blogging is not dead
- Decide on your blogs purpose
- Use Keyword research to find out what potenial consumers are searching for
- Ask your actual consumers what they want (or find out)
- Scope out competitor blogs
- Put it all together with some sexy titles
