After all the research you’ve done, choosing a blog topic can seem like a nightmare! Let’s break it down into five easy steps you can follow. Then you can choose a blog topic that is profitable and will build you a large audience.
Step One: Social Listening This is exactly what it sounds like. This means listening to what people are talking about on social media channels. You want to focus on the conversations your target audience is having. This strategy requires you to know where the social media area is that your potential audience will be hanging out. Social demographics and some well-respected customer personas can help you cut through the noise and turn around your social media monitoring labors. Here are some social media platforms you should consider.
If you have a company, and you’re starting a blog for business to business information, you’ll want to listen to the conversations happening in some LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your topic. You’ll also want to pay attention to your own LinkedIn page. Focus on topics that bring up warm and lively conversations. When you identify these and track down original links to the industry articles and blog posts that inspired these conversations, you have the material you need to create a blog post that addresses the concerns of the niche market you have.
Google Plus
Just as with LinkedIn, if you haven’t created a Google+ page, now’s the time. In addition to keeping you connected to Google search results, building a strong Google+ community will give you the content you need for blog posts, just like LinkedIn. To fully utilize this platform, you need to share not only your own content, but also updates that are useful to your target audience. This makes your Google+ page less about you and more about the readers, which pays off in the long run in terms of building credibility and authority, as well as driving readers to the site.
Facebook’s organic reach may be next to nothing, but if you’re a business with mostly customer or customer-based blogs, you need to start and promote a Facebook page. Like Google+, posting links that are useful to your customers, whether they’re from your own blog or a noncompetitive blog, will create discussion that informs you about your blogging strategy. You can answer some questions, provide some useful follow-up, and write more about a topic that’s driving a discussion.
Twitter Trends is a list this social platform provides that contains breaking news and some real-time trending topics. Twitter trends are created by an algorithm that tries to identify topics that are being talked about at this very moment, more than they were in the past. Obviously, not all of these topics are going to prove relevant to your target audience. If you’re in the search marketing industry, #SEO may be your target niche. Keeping track of developments on Twitter is a great way to stay one step ahead with blog posts that capture the latest and greatest topics being discussed on this social media platform.
SlideShare
This is another social media platform you may want to incorporate into your monitoring efforts. If you haven’t used SlideShare for presentations, you may want to consider it. This PPT presentation site drives industry interest and awareness. For presentation uploads that are popular, consider repurposing the content into a post.
Step Two: Industry Forums and News If your blog topic is represented in a professional industry association or organization that publishes regular newsletters and articles, you may want to pay attention to them and subscribe to them. The topics of these articles can be great topics for a blog post, or a series of articles, depending on how thorough the original content is. Try looking for angles on timely issues or news items that are familiar with the forum or newsletter, and can appreciate the detail others in the topics cover in the professional.
Step Three: Blog Post Questions and Comments While it may seem a little obvious, your own blog posts will provide interesting post ideas through your reader questions and comments. Pay attention to posts that generate a lot of reader interest by tracking the amount of social sharing, questions, and comments you see. Then create follow-up posts that expand on the initial post and address some specific questions and general ones. Don’t forget to check out your competition’s blog questions and comments, too!
Step Four: The Help Section Contact the customer service department and create a ranked list of the most frequent topics and questions by e-mail, online forums, and phone. Customer service knowledge bases are used to answer questions that can give you valuable content to use in your posts. Writing blog posts related to customer service questions has the added benefit of providing a lot of exposure for the answer and how to resolve the problem, which helps reduce customer service costs and calls. This relates to blog posts that are created for businesses, but you can also take a look at reviews on products on sites like Amazon and Newegg to see what else people are asking.
Step Five: Use the BrightEdge Platform A second source of excellent post ideas can be obtained from competitor’s blogs. See what topics are generating interest in the way of social sharing and discussion, and then beat them to the punch with some of your own answers that readers want to see. BrightEdge customers have access to a very powerful resource known as a data cube. This can provide a detailed list of keyword topics that rank on page one, two, and three pointing to pages on your competitor’s website that relate to these keywords.
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