Once upon a time, I stopped blogging for months.
Now, I always had the best intentions. I made all sorts of promises to myself.
Like Seth Godin, I was going to blog every day. (That lasted for one day.)
A daily blog was a ridiculous bar. I was not Seth Godin, I comforted myself.
A bi-weekly blog post was an even better idea. Consistent but not too much. Just right – like baby Bear’s porridge.
But none of these grand ideas ever did turn into action.
A big part of the problem was just figuring out what to write about. (The other was the lack of a system. I’ve blogged weekly for the past 7 months by working on my blog each day. You can learn more here.)
Turns out I was doing it all wrong.
When I started blogging, I tried to write about what everyone else was writing. Now, I don’t get think there’s anything wrong that. It can be helpful to cover major industry news on your blog so your readers stay updated.
The problem was that I wasn’t adding anything new.
As a journalist, it was my job to find stories every day I could write about, and identify a unique angle. Suddenly, that skill set disappeared.
And that’s part of the reason writing – and finding things to write about – was so hard.
I was reporting again but now the news hook was gone, too. (Is that called spam?)
In this post, I’d like to list some popular ways to find topics in your industry, and how you can sprinkle some of your personality and insights into every post.
Finding Topics Your Customers Care About
With each post, you’re out to deliver something helpful.
Maybe it’s a new perspective? Perhaps a tool that will help them save time. It’s a kind of transformation. You are moving your audience from one state to another.
In journalism, I think of it like this – the reader is transitioning from uninformed to informed. They have what they need to make a decision, grounded in data. The journalist went out to collect and organize the information and presented both sides. Now, it’s up to the citizen – free will guided by facts.
So, you can’t control what you readers do after they read your article, but you’ll know you did your job if you inform.
For your business blog, you may be setting out to help your reader confront a nagging problem, conquer a challenge and take the step towards a better future.
The best way to get this done is to write about topics they already care about.
Fortunately, in the digital age, there are tons of ways to get the job done.
Here are three popular ones I’ve used.
Amazon Books
In this blog post on Authority Hacker, Perrin Carrell suggests heading over Amazon to structure your blog categories.
Amazon is seriously a gold mine for learning more about your customers.
It’s easy to see why: Amazon clocked over $200bn sales in 2018. For better or worse, Amazon has our data and a lot of it.
That makes it equal parts terrifying, equal parts reliable source of information about your target market. (Maybe more parts terrifying after you read this. Put the kids to bed and enter the horror that awaits us all.)
So, the method Carell recommends is this:
- Head over to best-selling books
- Let’s try Computer and Technology
- Now check the subcategories
- Drill further down, depending on the type of company you have
- We’ll hone in on Web Development and Design
If you study these categories, you may find they make good overall sections for your site.
- Content Management
- Programming
- User Experience & Usability
- User Generated Content
- Web Design
- Web Marketing
- Web Services
- Website Analytics
Carrell suggests using some – or all – of these as pillar categories.
This is a good start – it gives you an idea of the broad content areas you could cover on your blog.
I like this approach because Amazon has already gone out and done a ton of research on your behalf: market research is a billion-dollar industry; Jeff Bizos is running yours like his business depends on it.
Udemy
Brian Dean’s Guide on Blogging curates comprehensive resources to find proven topics. By proven topics, Dean means there’s already a demonstrated interest in these subjects.
Udemy is one of the places you can find these ideas. Now, if you’ve ever researched an online course, you’ve probably ended up at Udemy. And, they have some truly awesome courses.
Here’s the thing, those course curriculums are treasure troves for your topic hunt.
Think about it this way: people are already paying to learn more about these topics.
So, imagine how valuable your FREE content would be if you could put together a helpful article.
Now, you don’t need to write a 3000-word research report on a topic. You can but every post doesn’t need to do that. You can set out to make a complicated subject a little bit simpler for your reader.
So, you may be a tech company helping to keep SMMEs safe from hacks. You’ll see there are tons of cybersecurity courses. And they’re popular too.
Focus on the most popular courses and build blog topics around these.
This might lead to posts like:
- A Beginners Guide to Business Cybersecurity
- How to Prevent Hacks and Secure Your Business Email
- The Only VPNs That Will Protect Your Data <
I came up with these in the first 10 minutes armed only with a basic understanding of cybersecurity. Imagine what you can about an industry you know intimately in an hour.
Conference Agendas
This is another gem from Brian Dean’s blogging guide.
In this one, you find agendas for conferences in your industry and scan the topics. This is a great way to build thought leadership.
You can even take it one step further, and cover the conference as a reporter.
If it’s a big conference, it may be relevant to your industry that there’s a panel discussion devoted to the topic.
So, if you spot a subject, you may want to do a deep dive on it, using the angle that it’s being discussed at the conference.
For instance, if you’re an IT company that helps businesses to start using cloud computing, you’d probably be interested in an AWS Summit.
Chances are you’re an AWS partner, so staying updated is necessary to make the best recommendations to your customers, anyway.
It’s Always Been You
While these are great topic sources, you still want to provide a fresh perspective. And there are a few ways you do that:
Draw from our own experience so you can better relate and discuss a new trend. Whenever I write about how technology is changing work, I think back to my own career. While working in the newsroom, and then in PR, I saw how social media altered how people got news. I often draw on this time and the lessons I learned for these pieces.
Check your FAQs and customer communication. What are the common concerns about a popular topic that you already addressed? Use specifics in your discussion.
Thanks to the internet, we have new ways to find topics, and these methods are driven by data – that’s data that big companies pay billions for; we get it for free. (Unless we get it from Facebook, then we’re the product.) When you combine these analytics with your own perspective, it’s what you need to create refreshing, different and valuable content. From then, there are no limits to what you can do.
Featured image: Nikita Kachanovsky on Unsplash
