Do You Struggle With Blog Post Topics?

Starting a blog today is much easier than it was in the past. Because of the advancement in technology, you don't have to be computer savvy. You can get everything setup up and ready to go for your first blog post in a few hours. However, one of the struggles I hear from small business owners is trying to come up with blog post topics consistently.

To run a successful blog, it is best to have a regular supply of fresh and quality content. Creating your professional looking blog and the right niche is just half of what is needed. To make and keep your blog a success, you need to come up with great content that will attract your audience and turn them into loyal readers. If you can't come up with content your readers can relate to and build their curiosity, they will disappear before you know it. They will just move on to the next blog.

Because we live in an ever changing world due to social, economic and political matters, etc., nothing stays the same. Something that was hot and popular last week, month or year (sometimes even yesterday) may not be interesting to others now. So where can you go to get fresh ideas for your blog posts?

Here are just a few ways to get you started and hopefully make things easier for you to come up with some quality topics to write about:

Social Media

Keeping up with your social media networks can be a powerful way to find fresh ideas on your niche that you could write about each week. By following the buzz in social media networks, you can find topics on what is hot, which can give you trending topics to think about. Here are some suggestions on who to keep an eye on in your social media networks:

• Follow others that have a similar business to yours

• Follow those that you have determined to be your ideal clients/customers

• Follow others that are in a different niche than yours, but may have clients/customers that could be interested in your topics. For example, someone could have a content marketing business, but could follow a business coach because the coach may post things for their clients that are related to content marketing.

Other Blogs

By reading other blog posts from those that write about topics you may be interested in writing about is another productive tactic. Google your niche and find other small businesses that consistently write updates and connect with them. To make sure you are seeing what they are posting online, you can do the following:

• Opt-in for their newsletters

• Sign up for their blog feeds (RSS feeds)

• Find them on your social media networks and connect with them there

News

Depending on what your niche is, you may be surprised by how many ideas you could come up with to write about by keeping up with the news. Of course, not only will doing this help give you some ideas, you'll also be able to keep up with current affairs. Multi-tasking at your best! There are many new publications available, but here are a few to keep in mind:

• Huffington Post

• The Wall Street journal

• The Washington Post

• USA Today

Google Alerts

Using Google Alerts is a very powerful resource in finding what topics are trending (it is my favorite). The tool is especially useful because you can go in and sign up to receive daily or weekly emails showing what is being searched for and talked about online. Or you can ask that you receive updates "as-it-happen." If you are not familiar with Google Alerts, here is how you can get started:

• Go to http://www.google.com/alerts

• Type in your search query (keywords related to your niche)

• Pick if you want the alerts from Everything, News, Blogs, Video, Discussions and Books

• Choose language and region

• Pick how often you want to receive the alerts

• Choose "Only the best results" or "All results"

• Input the email address you want the results sent to

• Create Alert

In addition to using Google Alerts for blog post topic ideas, it is a great way to find out if you and your business are showing up in search results. I have both Missy Tincher and My Miss Assist setup as a Google Alert and I get very excited and accomplished when I see one of those names on the list. Tip: Be careful that you choose "Only the best results" in the step above or you may receive alerts on topics not remotely related to what you are working for. Before I did that, I had to laugh quite often at what I read.

Do you find not having any current good ideas to post blogs about irritating and annoying? You have your blog ready to go and eager to get started, but then you feel unproductive because you are not sure what to write about. I know how difficult that can be and can definitely understand your frustrations. By using the above resources, I hope that you find it easier to come up with the blog post topics you are looking for each time you are needing fresh content.