4 little-known strategies for creating powerful marketing blog topics
Coming up with marketing blog topics – ideas for your blog to market your business – week in and week out is difficult, to say the least.
Quick tip: Have Evernote or a similar app always nearby so when that killer blog topic idea strikes you from out of the blue, you can immediately capture it. Remember the old Chinese proverb: The faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory. (In our digital age, I think apps like Evernote are included as “ink” in that wisdom!)
Unfortunately, for most of us, those random, great ideas don’t strike all that often, so we need systems and strategies to for creating marketing blog topics, and that’s what I’m going to share here.
The accordion strategy
When you have a good topic at hand, think about the subsections that will be included in the content. Usually, these will be subheads.
Once you know the subheads, give them additional thought with the goal of making the strongest ones stand-alone blogs, or parts of a series. This expands your material like an accordion…but unlike most, it will be an “accordion” that’s music to your ears.
Expand on the work of others
A variation on the point above is to expand on content that others have created. An easy way to do this is to find the most popular blog topics in your subject area, scan them, put all the subheads in a spreadsheet, and choose the best subhead topics for stand-alone blogs.
There’s a good free tool on the Internet that you can use for this strategy: Ruzzit. When you go to the Ruzzit website:
- Set categories to “all,”
- Set content type to “articles,”
- Set social network to the ones you feel are most appropriate, and
- Set time to a period that works for you. (The first time you do this, you might set it to “All Time.”)
This Ruzzit search will return the most viral content. At that point, it’s your job to find the articles that best suit your niche, review them, and capture the subheads. These subheads can often become blog topics on their own, or they may inspire related topics to write on.
Explore Amazon questions
If you sell or manufacture products, or provide a service that’s related to a product, find the bestselling products in this niche on Amazon and scan the questions buyers have asked.
I was just looking at one of those water filters that attach to your tap and found these questions:
- When using unfiltered water setting (Brita basic on tap filter), the water is white in color – as if there’s calcium. Has anyone else noticed this? A store selling these could address this concern as well as anyone who owns a plumbing business.
- How do you get a stuck filter out of the cone? This could lead to an article that specifically answers that question, but a better idea might be to do a longer article or series on troubleshooting these kinds of filters.
- I live in a modern house in Shanghai. Do you think it could be attached to a non-American faucet there? Addressing this question could lead to an interesting discussion of water and plumbing around the world.
Review reviews
Reviews of products on Amazon and other e-commerce sites as well as reviews of service providers on sites like Yelp and Angie’s List will also inspire blog topics.
I suggest starting with reviews from people who are disappointed or angry. These negative reviews immediately reveal problems that need to be solved – so why don’t you promote yourself as the business with the solution?
You can create posts explaining how you don’t make those mistakes or how your products don’t have those flaws. You can also use these kinds of reviews to help you write “What to look for” or “Avoid these red flags” types of articles.
Using these four strategies for creating powerful marketing blog topics, you can create a lot of great content. I suggest that you – or someone on your team – start by taking a half day working through these and capturing topics in a spreadsheet. After your first session of working each of these strategies, you can revisit them about once a month to discover new ideas.