Blogger’s Block
This blog post is for those marketing giraffes who sit and stare at a blank Word document each week or month, trying to come up with fresh ideas for blog topics and titles.
You know how important blogs are to an Inbound Marketing strategy, so you are committed to producing fresh content for the top, middle and bottom of your marketing funnel.
This is especially true at the top, where you can attract new audiences who are searching for problems that you can help with.
But what on earth are you going to write about this month? Your blog already has over 70 posts on all aspects of what your business does and beyond.
How can you come up with yet another article on the finer points of CNC milling and turning?
I share your pain.
I am tasked with producing at least ten blogs per month here at Intergage. That takes a lot creative thinking, research and, frankly, nail-biting.
Let Sleeping Blogs Lie
And once written, what we don’t want is for our blogs to lie sleeping in a dark corner of the Internet.
So, what are the factors that are most likely to get our blog posts ranked in the search engines (and therefore found by our intended audience) and opened and read?
Firstly, we need to have done our keyword research. What does our intended audience care about? What problems are they trying to solve and what language do they use?
And of course our keyword research should be steered by the in-depth personas we have built of our target audience.
If we understand our intended audiences, then we will know what their hopes, fears and joys are.
The second factor is having a great blog title that is on-topic for our audience and sounds like it is worth a read. But how do you come up with those ideas?
That’s when the nail-biting starts.
Every Blog Has Its Day
If you want your blog to have its day in the sun, then it’s really important that you get the title right.
Let me share with you a rather excellent resource from those good people at HubSpot.
The Blog Topic Generator.
Just take up to three keywords that you want to write about and drop them into the blog topic generator:
It will then return you five great titles for blog posts. Here are the results for the above:
As you can see from their caveat, the algorithm isn’t perfect.
The ‘dogs’ thing was just for fun (tools for the dogs industry!?).
So, you can always ask it to try again:
This is a great tool.
HubSpot is very aware of the most opened and read blog titles, so it takes your keywords and incorporates them into those kinds of structures.
It’s free too. So, you can use it as many times as you like to generate all sorts of ideas.
Even if you don’t use one of their suggested titles, it might spark an idea of your own.
But before you start writing your blog remember these top five blog writing tips. And that you can always improve your blog after it’s written through the editing process too.
Or you could go completely ‘off-piste’ and use dog idioms as subtitles to see how that works.
Who let the Blogs out?
If all of this sounds like fun, but you just don’t have the room in your diary, don’t worry. There are many agencies out there who will happily deliver your Inbound Marketing strategy for you.
They may even help you come up with one.
If you’d like to talk to one of our helpful marketing nerds about that, just give us a call or come along to one of our Marketing Leaders Lunch events.
