5 Great Ways You Can Generate Blog Post Ideas
Posted by Marketing Man in Marketing for Accountants,Online Marketing,SEO | September 14, 2012
Having a blog for your accountancy website is a great way to keep the website fresh, keep the google bot coming back to crawl your site and generate more traffic from longtail searches. The problem is how do you keep coming up with great ideas for blog posts? All too often a business will start a blog and go at enthusiastically for a few weeks before running out of ideas and the blog dies.
If this sounds like you or if you are still sitting on the fence when it comes to using a blog on your website because of this issue here a few ways you can consistently come up with fresh content ideas for you accountancy blog.
1. Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers is a question and answer website where users can post a question about anything they want and other users can answer that question. Aside from contributing to the site Yahoo Answers is a great source of blog post ideas, search through the site and make a note of any questions that are relevant to your business. Once you have a list of questions you have a list of blog post ideas, create a blog post to answer the question in depth and, if the Question is still open, pop back to Yahoo Answers and provide an answer with a link back to your blog post.
2. Quora
Quora is very much along the same lines as Yahoo Answers though you do seem to get a much more professional type of user than Yahoo. Essentially users pose a question and experts can provide their answer, again this is a great way to find out what potential customers may need answering.
3. Google Alerts
Google Alerts are a great way to keep in touch with what other people may be publishing on the internet, this is a great way to stay up to date with relevant information and generate ideas for your own blog. You need to put a little time and thought into the words and phrases that you wish to trigger an alert but once set up you will have fresh content ideas delivered direct to your inbox or RSS reader.
Also, as a bonus tip, this is a great way to find relevant blogs in the accountancy niche that you can get links from.
4. Your Traffic Logs
You are tracking your traffic right? If not read our article on why you need a web analytics package. Once you are tracking your website’s traffic then you can use this data to see what search terms people have been using to find your site, within these terms you may find a number of questions that people were looking to get answers for. Use this information to tailor your blog content to meet these needs.
5. Relevant Industry Forums
There are a number of accountancy specific forums out there and it is a good idea to be active in, at least, the more popular forums. For the purposes of this post we want you to look at these forums and see what your peers are discussing, see what questions are being asked and just generally get a feel for what is relevant in the industry. You should be able to brainstorm a number of blog post ideas just by browsing through threads in an accountancy forum.
Bonus Ideas
Still having some trouble, here a few bonus ideas:
- Pay a professional writer. If you still cannot come up with ideas for content then it may be time for you to consider outsourcing this task to a professional writer.
- Social Networks. Monitor Facebook and Twitter to see what people in your industry are discussing. Use Twitter search to find users who have questions about accountancy and use these as blog post ideas.
- Think of any myths or common misconceptions about accountancy and post a blog post dispelling them.
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About the Author – Marketing Man
Marketing Man is a superhero marketer hell bent on a personal crusade to improve the websites and marketing of UK accountancy firms. Check him out on Google+
I always advise clients to keep an pen and notepad with them at all times. Inspiration for a blog article can come in many ways and don’t forget, what you consider every day as part of company, your clients may find that interesting or informative.
Thanks for the comment John, good tip about keeping something handy to jot down ideas.
Great ideas here, Yahoo answers is a great one. I want to add that lists are some of the best ideas for posts and fit any niche. People love lists, they do take time to compile but it’s worth it, on my site I get lots of people linking to my long lists of relevant content.