5 ways to get ideas for your blog and inbound marketing

The hardest part about keeping your blog overflowing with helpful content is knowing what to write. This is where classic writer’s block pops up the most and makes blogging a chore. Let’s fix that. In this post, we’ll give you the easiest ways to find content ideas so that you always know which content will help you achieve your marketing goals.

1. Check your inbox

This is supposedly an old blogger trick, although I don’t think blogs have been around long enough for that to be possible. The idea is to check your inbox for the most common questions that you receive and list them out in a doc. This should yield at least 5 or 10 blog post topics.

For bonus points, grab your responses to those questions from your email thread. Now you have a topic and a basic outline. Your inbox is the first place to look for content ideas that you can create and post fast. So, use it!

2. Buyer personas

These semi-fictional representations of your ideal buyer are uber-handy for marketing. They also make it easier to create persona-driven content. This is content that’s so clearly focused on one group that it feels like it was written just for them.

To find the right topics to cover, look at the challenges that your personas face. One of the major challenges they might list is increasing the number of leads from their website. With this information in hand, you can create a blog post that explains how to increase the number of online leads your company receives. Repeat this process until you run out of challenges to help them with. Doing this will ensure that the content that you create is extremely beneficial to your buyer personas.

3. Your blog

This may seem like an odd place to look for new content, but your blog is actually a well of information that can help you create fresh posts. The key is taking what you've already written and put a new spin on it. For example, you might have written an article about “five best practices for designing a new website.” You can use the same outline and much of the same information to create a negative post based on the same topic. The new post would be titled “the five biggest mistakes to avoid when designing a new website.” This allows you to take the same information and present it in a new way that might be more insightful for your readers. It also allows you to increase the SEO value of your site for those keywords.

4. Customer feedback and testimonials

Many copywriters use a simple trick of taking words directly from customer testimonials and working them into their copy. This is called stealing copy. But it's not really stealing. All you're doing is talking about what your customers have already told you is important to them.

You can also use this trick to find content ideas. Look through the feedback you've received from customers. What are the things that they’ve been most impressed by? For example, if a review says that they appreciated your strategic process for achieving results, then consider writing a blog post on that process. Conversely, if you receive feedback that they had felt stuck before contacting you, then you could write a post about how to jumpstart a new project. Using actual customer feedback as the basis for a new post allows you to tune into what your prospects need and care about.

5. Industry news, events, and launches

I wouldn't recommend this as your first option when trying to fill your blog with content. It's more important for you to focus on evergreen topics that your buyers will continuously search for. But, at the same time, it's also important to keep your blog full of topics relevant to your business and have high-quality backlinks. Reporting on industry news, events you’ve attended, and product launches help you to do this in a way that's easy and fast.

All you need to do is make sure you're subscribed to a few neutral news sources for your industry. You want these news sources to be neutral so that you can add your own flavor to your post. Next, write a post that references the news piece, explains its implications, and gives your perspective on it. Doing this shows that your company is active in your industry, aware of recent news, and understands the implications for itself and its customers. Do the same thing for industry events and launches, and your blog will always be full of interesting and helpful content.

Need something more progressive?

These five tactics are great for keeping your blog full of relevant and useful information to your buyers. But, you need to take things to the next level if you want your blog to be an effective marketing tool that brings in sales. To do this, you need a sales funnel, SMART goals, and a carefully planned out content calendar that will boost your site's SEO ranking for important keywords.

If you need help creating any of these, consider signing up for one of our inbound marketing workshops. In our workshops, we’ll help you understand who your buyers are, your blog’s voice, what the best sales funnel is, and provide you with a year's worth of blog topics to write about. From there, your inbound marketing can go on autopilot and continuously bring you high-quality leads. If this sounds like it would save you a lot of time and headaches, then contact us today to learn more.