The following is a guest post by Samantha Mason. Samantha Mason is young blogger and freelance writer from Pasadena, CA. She deals with various topics, but her true passion is travelling and backpacking. Apart from writing, you can find her hiking up a mountain or reading on a beach. You can find Samantha on Facebook.
Once upon a time, there was a blogger, who had no idea what to write about. The article titles and topics did not come to his mind, and he suffered. Many things happened along his way to success. However, he started publishing dozens of fantastic articles for his own blog and moreover he started sending his guest posts for millions of blog platforms. Do you want to know what happened along his way to success?
We are going to tell you some secrets about how to generate a lot of great topics, and explain what a ‘good topic’ is. Hopefully, you will find it helpful.
The best topic for your blog is the best topic for your target audience
The first thing to consider when choosing a topic for your blog is your audience. Everything depends on your visitors. It is obvious that there is nothing more important than their preferences and interests, simply because you are writing your posts for them and your success depends on how well you know your readers.
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The truth is that the longer you write your blog and the better you analyze your readers, the easier it will be to come up with new ideas. Read and respond to the comments and listen to what they say. If you know your readers, then even a mediocre article will connect with them in the best way.
The best way to get to know your audience is to define it. You have to decide, who you want to reach and attract by means of your blog. Try to figure out what problems and questions they may have. For instance, if you visit the blog section of Studentshare.net you will see that the posts located there are familiar and useful to the website’s visitors. Obviously, people, who come to Studentshare.net are students, and they are interested in the topics connected with education, college life and useful advice on how to cope with their homework and exams. For that reason, bloggers simply give them what they need.
Relevancy between your topics and your audience
Relevancy is more than just popularity. It has a narrow focus on the most specific problems and interests your readers may have. This point refers to the first one because trying to make your blog relevant without defining your audience is like trying to drive a car without having wheels.
So, relevancy is focused on the following:
- Your niche. If your niche is narrow, it is easier to define the relevancy. For example, a blog located at the website Lovethatpet.com is dedicated to pet care, pet feed, pet health and so on. It is not a very good idea to publish an article about informational technologies and programming on a pet blog.
- Objectives. The next step is connecting your objectives to the blog’s relevancy. Every blog owner has an objective that is more than just attracting visitors to get traffic. You must be trying to get something beyond it. Think about it: do you need subscriptions? Or conversions? Identify your main aim and then create blog posts considering it.
- Present time. The next point is being up-to-date with your articles. Nobody is going to read old news or outdated information. Try to research what are the trending topics of your niche and what is more – try to predict future trends. If you do, not only your readers but also Google will love your articles because all of them prefer fresh content.
- Problem-solving. Start with problems and end up with offering solutions. If you can define the main ‘pains’ of your readers and moreover suggest how to solve them – your articles will be super-relevant.
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Find a good blog to ‘borrow’ ideas
If you want to write on amazing topics, you have to find some blogs that are doing it and borrow some ideas from them. Now, if you think that we offer you to steal someone’s content, you are wrong. Let us explain.
What we suggest is to make a list of blogs you like and follow their example. You can use blogs that are in your niche or beyond it. Pick the articles that you admire and paraphrase the titles to make them fit your niche. For instance, you want to borrow an article idea from Lifehacker.com, but your niche is web design, not life hacking. Look through the most popular articles and figure out the headlines relevant to your blog. For instance:
- 5 Killer Web Design Trends
- 10 Steps to the Amazing Web Design Layout
- 7 Web Designer Tools You Can’t Live without
In a word, Lifehacker.com inspires you, and you do the rest. But do not steal the article content. That is not going to fly.
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Do you have any brainstorming techniques that help you come up with brilliant topics? If so, let us know about them in the comments.
