What Should You Blog About?

I’m sure you have imagined yourself writing a blog post that would go viral. You are careful with your topics, your word choices, and your sentences because you are certain that writing the best article will be your claim to fame.

Unfortunately, your imagined reality is still a fantasy. Even with the right words, large audience, and hundreds of social media shares, it still ain’t enough to send your blog to the top. When you thought that you could be the next big thing, sadly, you are nowhere near close to it.

The phenomenon is often called the overconfidence effect. It is a cognitive bias for humans to be inclined to overestimate their knowledge on pretty much anything. This is why, as digital marketers, we rely on our hunches rather than actual data. So, when we like a certain blog topic, we immediately assume that our readers will like it, too.

With that being said, here are four ways to choose blog topics without depending too much on your own personal biases.

1) Know what works and what doesn’t.

For my first tip, you don’t need to look for useful information elsewhere. View your blog metrics and study what the data is trying to tell you. Make sure that the metrics you choose to track heavily rely on marketing goals. Another business may track a different metric than yours. That’s fine.

Just aim to organize your blog posts. In order to better organize your posts, you need to assign relevant tags to each post. Adding the topic will work well as its tag. By doing this, you are able to know what topic excels and what does not.

2) Ask your subscribers.

There’s no need to go around asking random people on the internet what they want to know. Just ask your readers which topics they want to read. You can do this by sending a survey to your email list. Or, you can display a survey on your site.

Whichever route you choose, your audience will be more likely to respond if you add incentives. Let them know that all survey respondents will have a chance to win a discount coupon or free shipping voucher. If you are feeling generous, you could give everyone a freebie.

3) Know how you can help your customers.

You don’t have to be the expert about everything concerning your business. Ask the sales and marketing team about the customers and their shopping experience. This way, you have an idea of the needs of your customers. So, don’t hesitate to work with the other teams because they could help you understand your audience better.

Conduct frequent meetings and let the sales and marketing team share what they learned regarding the customers’ common problems, and ask them for their recommendations about this.

4) Identify what works for your direct competitors.

There are tools available online that can help you if you are curious about what rival websites have that you do not. BuzzSumo and EpicBeat can help you inspect their blog posts. You will probably stumble upon other topics that would cater to your audience, too. Since you are direct competitors, there’s a higher chance that you would have similar readers. Use this to your advantage.

SOURCES: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/research-blog-topics