All business websites can benefit from a strong blog section. Not only can an expertly search engine optimised blog page draw new customers to your site and increase the overall visibility of your brand, but it can also help to establish you as an expert in your field.
By carefully creating a blog plan and sticking to it over as the weeks and months go by, you can give your entire business a boost. The only question is… how do you find content ideas?
Beat the content planning blues
Content planning is a very vague and broad term, which is why, as a task, it sounds so ridiculously easy at the outset. Of course you can come up with ideas for topics to write about; there’s a whole world of juicy subjects out there just waiting for you to get stuck in. Right?
Content planning is one of those tasks that gets more complicated the closer you look at it – and you need to look at it closely if you’re aiming to succeed. Some things to consider when assembling a content plan are:
The purpose of your business
The content on your blog needs to be, at the very least, tangentially related to the products you sell or services you provide. If you’re a chimney sweep, there’s no sense spending hours penning an article about your favourite Harry Potter characters. Now reviewing your favourite Mary Poppins characters, on the other hand…
Your brand’s tone of voice
You should probably have this worked out a long time before you begin planning your blog. Do you want the ‘voice’ of your business to be young, witty and irreverent, or prestigious, mature and trustworthy? If you’re a young person’s backpacking tour agency, adopting a solemn and severe manner will drive away as many customers as a funeral director cracking one-liners at every opportunity.
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Once you’ve figured out what fits your brand, keep this tone consistent throughout your content planning.
Your SEO strategy
Search engine optimisation is all about choosing the right keywords to use on your site; keywords that your target audience is typing into search engines on a regular basis. Therefore, when creating a content plan, you need to think about which keywords and phrases you can focus the article around.
This could be an entire question, or one word – it all depends on the rate at which people are searching for your terms. It should go without saying that terms that are more commonly searched for make better keyword ideas, and better topics for your articles!
Your PR and Social strategies
It’s important to consider what makes an idea shareable. SEO is important, but if you’re coming up with keywords that are too niche, difficult or dull, you’ll struggle to get the readers you want. By creating content ideas that are fresh and engaging, however, you can increase their shareability on social media and through outreach campaigns.
See? Suddenly, it’s not quite so easy when you need to come up with article ideas that are in-keeping with your brand’s theme, a tonal match, SEO-focussed and shareable. Thankfully, however, we’ve got a few pointers for you. Here we go.
How to create a brilliant content plan
Brain dump
We could have used the word ‘brainstorm’ here, but that sort of implies the ideas you’ll be coming up with initially will be any good. They… probably won’t be. Grab a pen and paper, post-it notes, a word doc – whatever works best for you – and rattle through as many content ideas as you can.
It could be a single word, it could be a phrase, it could be a full title, it doesn’t matter. Just get those creative juices flowing. If you need 5 solid articles, throw down 25 slapdash ideas. Quick and dirty is the name of the game.
Sift
Okay, if you followed the advice above, then you should have a sheet of paper covered in a lot of pretty dreadful ideas. Cross out the most heinous ones right off the bat, followed by any that are too wacky/mundane for your brand’s tone of voice, and any that are too niche/long-winded to be readable.
Refine
Now it gets serious: fire up Ahrefs or Keyword Planner. If you’re unfamiliar with these tools, they’re two great websites which, once you’ve set up an account, allow you to look at the search volumes of any keywords you choose. Through observing the number of Google searches of any given term over various amounts of time, you can roughly gauge what your potential audience will be, should your article successfully make it to the first page of Google.
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If search interest in a particular phrase is low, try phrasing the idea in another way and refreshing. In this way, you can whittle down your list of ideas to find the gems: ideas that are punchy, interesting, and have a lot of people searching online for them.
Rephrase
So – hopefully by now you’ll have a handful of excellent ideas ready to go. You’re not quite done yet, however. What remains is to whip these amorphous ideas into article-ready shape, by crafting catchy, clickable titles for them.
Imagine you own a business selling, say, jaunty hats. In your brain dump, you remembered that you sell tricorn hats, which prompted you to jot down ‘pirates’. It’s fun, and it’s reasonably on-brand. What’s more, while refining the idea, you found tons of people are searching for keywords around this subject. All that’s left is to put it into a catchy title.
The website AnswerThePublic.com is great for this stage of content planning. After you type in a word or phrase like ‘pirate hats’, the site generates hundreds of phrases related to this that people are actively searching for online. From this simple search, you can find a ton of ideas such as ‘types of pirate hats’, ‘how to wear a pirate hat’, and ‘how to make a pirate hat’. Nice.
Make it irresistible
The final step in your content-generating odyssey is to click-baitify your content. The internet has developed its own language by this point; marketers have figured out that there are certain titles people are simply more likely to click. These include:
– Numbers
Adding a number to a title increases its appeal to the average reader, for some reason. Compare ‘8 ways to wear a pirate hat’ with ‘how to wear a pirate hat’. Which one sounds more interesting?
– Bold language
You can make a title even punchier by adding exciting language: ‘8 killer ways to wear a pirate hat’. It’s face-slappingly simple, but it works a treat.
And there you have it…
A tried-and-tested way to create thorough, dazzling content plans that’ll bring fresh eyes to your beloved website. Now, if you’ve read through all of this and decided that it sounds like quite a lot of effort and you can’t really be bothered with creating your own content plan – you’re in luck, because that’s one of the many things we do an excellent job at, here at Suki Marketing. Get in touch today – let’s have a coffee and a chin wag!
