Marketers will tell you that your business website will benefit from a well-written and regularly updated blog. Not only does it give you the chance to improve your SEO, it also, hopefully, should set you up as an expert in your field – someone to be trusted and followed. Ideally your articles can be used across your social platforms increasing your profile and Reach.
How to Overcome Bloggers Block
The problem many businesses encounter is coming up with topics to write about. When you first start, it can be easy. There are four or five hot topics you can quite easily discuss with visitors. But then it becomes more difficult. You start scratching your head for more topics and it all becomes a lot harder work.
Two things normally happen when this happens. First, businesses tend to neglect their blog and concentrate on easier aspects of marketing. Secondly, you start to pick weak subjects that begin to veer away from what your company is all about.
My advice is always to keep your mind focused on specifics. Select an aspect of your business that you have in-depth knowledge or experience of which can be utilised to provide useful advice that people connect with. This can include how to guides, explanatory articles, case studies and news breaking pieces. It can help to drill back to the basics and take a look at your business environment from the point of view of the customer. What do they really want to know? How can you help them?
For example, if you are a jewellery designer then an article on how you can care for a particular piece might be useful. If you are an accountant, putting technical jargon into layman terms can provide some good engagements.
Some businesses seem to have a never ending choice of blog posts available to them. Other businesses are pretty niche and this is where the problem generally occurs. What most business owners don’t realise is that their choice of subjects to write about is usually a lot bigger than they think.
Here’s a quick mind mapping experiment to get you thinking about different blog post ideas
Start with a big sheet of paper with the name of your business in the centre. Fire out some arrows to subtitles for different parts of your industry or the different types of customers you attract. Then add some other subheadings to each of these which are essentially information that is pertinent in these areas.
Here’s a sample for an accountant. One subheading would be tax returns. Questions your customers might ask are:
- What is a tax return?
- How do I fill in a tax return?
- What is corporation tax for business?
- When is my tax return due?
- What happens if I don’t get my tax return in on time?
All these can be made into interesting blog posts. For the kind of customers who you attract to your business, each post gives them valuable information that they can actually use. If you educate your customers and give them practical advice, then you become an expert in your field. It’s easier than you think to come up with good ideas for blog posts and building a list of future posts means you don’t have to scratch your head to come up with ideas when you most need them.
If you would like to find out how The Last Hurdle can help you to create engaging blog content, contact our copywriters at sales@thelasthurdle.co.uk or call 01604 654545.