Brainstorming Blog Topics With a Writing Expert
Topics to Write About
Coming up with a list of topics to write about for your blog can be time-consuming, so wouldn’t it be great to just come up with your whole year’s worth of ideas right away? To make things easy for you, I’ve compiled a list of topics, with examples, to help you come up with your own list quickly.
Are you ready to brainstorm your list of topics to write about for your blog? If so, get out a pen and paper, read through the following list, and jot down the ideas that come to you. Not all of the topics below will work for your brand or business, but they should spark some ideas!
Inside the Business
Exploring and sharing what we do as a business can be valuable blog information for our customers. They can understand us better and it differentiates us from our competitors. For example, if we share information about who we are and what’s important to us, that makes us stand out from our competitors who don’t blog, or those competitors whose blogs are only about their products or come across salesy. Here are some ideas on business specific topics that you should consider blogging about:
• About Your Employees or about you. Sure, you might already have an about page on your website, but why not blog about yourself as well. Include a few things that aren’t already included in your about page. Or, if you have employees, why not blog about them and their interests?
• Behind the scenes (a day in the life). What does the day in the life of your business look like? Is it a little crazy? What about a day where unexpected thing happened, how did you respond? Share those great stories!
• Share a case study. Do you have a case study document on your website? Write a blog about the case study, add in some background that isn’t included in the document itself, and link to the document.
• A customer story with a testimonial: For example, did you have a really great outcome for a customer and want to share it. Or maybe they were really happy with your work and are thrilled to give you a testimonial. Build the blog around what you did for the customer and that testimonial.
• Share information about a charity. Does your company donate or spend time helping out a charity? Share information about the charity and why it’s important to you. And when you or your team go work with the charity, don’t forget to take photos so you have them for your blog and social media.
• Describe something about your business that your customers or clients don’t understand. This is a great opportunity to describe something in your business that isn’t widely known. Perhaps explain the time it takes to come up with a great logo or explaining to the world what your bachelor’s degree in Organizational Communications is for (I get that question a lot).
• What are your business goals or professional/personal goals? Have you come up with some important goals for the new year? Sharing those goals not only makes you more accountable to getting them done but writing blogs throughout the year where you talk about how you are meeting your goals helps your readership see that you mean business. And if you’re good at obtaining goals, sharing how you do that can be valuable to readers, as well.
• Share pictures and information about your office. Share how you get things done in your office – whether it’s at a co-working space, at a home office, or in a business. What do you do to be productive?
Related: Top Tips For New Bloggers
• A series of photos with happy customers or customers wearing or using your product. If you’re a product-based business, having photos of customers wearing or using your product is as good as a testimonial. Also, seeing your product in its normal habitat – ie a purse on someone’s shoulder or a ring on someone’s finger, helps the reader see how it works and how it might look on them.
• Sneak peek of what you’re currently working on. Do you have something in the works that you’re excited about? If it’s something you can share, then why not share it? Maybe you’re working on a new course, a new book, or a new design for a handbag.
• Share a Video. Did you give a presentation that was published on YouTube? Create a blog post around the details of the video, embed it in your post, and make sure to share any fun or emotional stories about what happened on the day the video was created.
Making Life Easier
As we grow as businesses and business owners we often find things that teach us to be better or help us move faster. Sharing that information makes us more valuable to our readership if they can put those lessons into practice in their own lives. Here are a few topics that you should consider:
• Is there an app you can’t live without in your business and why? If there is an app, or a few apps, that make your life easier, share them! Maybe you’ve found the best app to keep yourself on track during the day such as blocking notifications during a specific time or the best app for keeping your meals healthy.
• Learning something new at a conference. Did you just attend a conference, retreat or event to get better at your business or your craft? Share pictures, what you learned and how you’ll use it in the business.
• A DIY Project. Did you design your own bulletin board because you couldn’t find one that worked for you? Or maybe you designed your own organizational system for your daily work. If it helped you, it will help someone else. So definitely share!
• This may sound terrible, but share a business failure and how you overcame it. Maybe your last partnership failed, but now you know what to look for in a business partner, or you’re going to bootstrap the business in order to circumvent the issue. People like to hear how we all grow and change. These insights can also help others learn from our mistakes.
• What are your favourite magazines, websites, blogs, and podcasts? What information do you find useful from online or print sources? Share that with your readers and make sure to say why you find them helpful or give specific examples.
• A lesson you learned in business. If you’ve found a great way to onboard clients, a simple way to design and create documents, or maybe a way to ensure there are no invoice heavy times, share those ideas or tips.
• What tools you use in your business and why? Perhaps you’ve found the perfect invoicing system because it’s easy to use and does just what you need, or what about that program you use to organize your email. I’d certainly love to hear about those finds.
Something a little different
What about getting a bit more creative with our blogs? Sharing business information and helping others with what we’ve learned is a good start, but these topics are a little more on the different side:
• Have a contest or giveaway. Offer a contest for followers of your blog. For your contest, consider what works best for your business. Options include a writing contest, voting contest, photo caption contest, a sweepstakes, or even a naming contest to name your new product. Then make sure to promote the contest through your social media channels, and your email list.
• Ask your followers some important questions. Are you launching something new and would love to get your customer’s input? Write a blog and link to a survey with your questions. You could use a Google form to collect the answers.
• Why follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. Use your blog to promote your social media and make sure to give your readers a reason to follow. For example, maybe you offer discounts on Facebook, but you share last minute sales on Twitter. FYI: Just asking to “follow me” is generally not enough incentive for followers, so give them something worth following.
• Share an Infographic. An infographic is a great visual way to share information. Don’t know how to make one? Hire someone to put something together for you or you might experiment with Canva. Obviously, you’d come up with something related to your business, but examples might include, creating a graphic on what types of advertising have a better return on investment, or a graphic showing the difference between types of coffee beans. Then write the blog to explain the details of the infographic.
• Interview someone. This interview could be written, a video, or podcast. If this is a video or a podcast, transcribe the first five minutes and use that as the blog. Who to interview? Others working in your niche, complimentary businesses, or business leaders you feel would have great insight.
• Something happening in the news. If there’s something in the news related to your industry, write a blog about it, and sharing links to the current news. For example, if your business is in online security and today’s news is plastered with information about a security breach, use that to talk about what your readers can do to be more secure online.
• Pictures of your city, town, state, etc. This is especially important if you prefer clients within your local area. By sharing information about where you live, people searching online for that city, town or state might find you easier.
That was a lot of ideas to go through. I hope you were writing your own list down as you were reading! If not, write down your topics that fit your business, add other ideas as they come to you, and put them into a schedule.
Now you have a list of topics for your blogs, you can go forth and get those blogs done. Happy Writing!
