12 Great Ways to Find New Content Ideas for Your Company Blog
Updated
If your company's website includes a blog, it’s important to add fresh, high-quality content on a regular basis.
Having frequently updated content boosts your website’s Google search rank and keeps your customers engaged with your brand.
When you're trying to keep your blog fresh and interesting, it can be difficult to come up with new topics to write about. Next time you’re at a loss for ideas, try these methods.
- Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Think about your target audience—what are their concerns, problems, interests, priorities? Use your buyer personas or your knowledge about your customers to create content designed to solve their problems and help them at each stage of the customer journey.
- Consult your customer-facing employees. Ask the people who are on the front lines with your customers—your salespeople and customer service personnel—what common concerns they’re hearing and use that information to develop content ideas.
- Ask your customers. Want to know what topics your customers would like to see covered in your blog? Ask them. You can ask customers in person whenever an opportunity arises, schedule an interview with a key customer, pose the question in a social media post or email newsletter, or ask for feedback in a more structured way by sending an email survey to customers.
- Monitor your social media. You should already be checking all your social media pages regularly and replying promptly to any comments or questions. As you look through comments, keep an eye open for any that might merit a full blog post.
- Visit Facebook groups. In addition to monitoring your own social media pages, join relevant Facebook groups and look through the conversations to find out what people are talking about, and make note of any good blog topic ideas.
- Browse through your blog comments. If you allow comments on your blog, look through them to see if anyone has feedback on existing blog posts that might give you an idea for a follow-up piece or a post on a different topic entirely.
- Check out the competition. Reading your competitors’ blog is a good way to keep up to date on current issues and hot topics in the industry, and to get ideas for posts you want to write on your own site (in your own words, of course).
- Use Google autocomplete. You can get great ideas for blog posts by simply entering a search term, or the beginning of a question using a keyword that’s relevant to your business (i.e., “How [keyword]" or “What [keyword]"), and seeing what Google suggests as a topic based on what millions of other people are searching.
- Read up on industry news and trends. Knowing what’s going on in your industry is not only important for your business, it’s a perfect way to come up with timely ideas for content that might be useful to your target audience. To stay up to date with news in your industry, set up Google Alerts for search terms you want to track.
- Audit your site search. If you have an internal search feature on your website, it’s easy to find out what your customers are looking for on your website and use that information to create content that answers the questions they have. You can check data from your internal site search by visiting Google Analytics and checking under Behavior>Site Search>Search Terms.
- Try a headline generator. Several free tools, such as Content Idea Generator, Tweak Your Biz Title Generator, Blog Title Generator, and Content Row Headline Generator will give you hundreds of suggested blog titles based on keywords or topics you enter.
- Find out what questions people are asking. Want to come up with some questions to answer? Answer the Public lets you enter a subject, then generates a graphic showing what questions people are searching for using that term, in sections for the type of query (why, how, what, when, who, can, will, which, where, and are).