Michael Epps Utley 
Blogging can be a headache for busy small business owners and marketers. You need to consistently publish to engage with prospective buyers and stay top-of-mind with them. Doing so also sends signals to Google and other search engines that you regularly publish timely content on your site, which helps with search engine optimization (SEO). However, coming up with fresh ideas for blog posts can be challenging.
This article reveals steps you can take to have a never-ending supply of blog topics at the ready.
1. Develop a Content Strategy
The best blog post ideas are the result of a sound content strategy. Your content strategy should address the following questions in five areas:
Audience: Who is in your consumer base, and what information would they find valuable from you?
Content: What types of content (written, video, audio, graphics, etc.) do you need to create to engage with them?
Channels: Where should you distribute content so the people you’re targeting will find it (social media, email, online publications, etc.)?
Logistics: With the resources you have available, what publishing schedule can you commit to?
Reporting: How do you know your content marketing is working?
As you develop your list of content topics, refer back to your content strategy. View it as the foundation for all content development. Make sure the topics you choose align with your strategy. If a topic does not fit within it, the people you’re targeting will likely not engage with it, which could cause them to lose interest in your blog.
2. Don’t Overthink Blog Topics
Ultimately, people visiting your blog want good, solid, actionable information. That means you shouldn’t overthink it. Don’t try to be clever or too original. Rather, make it your mission to provide clear, helpful information about the topics your customers care about. Ultimately, they will reward your efforts, and so will Google with high rankings for your content.
Start with essential, foundational topics related to your business and industry. A good place to start is by listing some common questions you receive (or anticipate receiving) from customers and writing out some responses as initial outlines. Eventually, you can tie all this material together with pillar pages that make it explicitly clear to your buyers — and Google — what your business is all about. Eventually, additional topics will build off the foundational ones you launch with. Many will overlap, and that’s okay. It will help engage blog readers more deeply because they’ll have an opportunity to explore more related content.
3. Conduct Keyword Research
What keywords and terms do the people you’re targeting use when searching for information related to your business and the products and services it sells? Conducting keyword research will help you figure this out.
Some tools you can use to do keyword research include Google Keyword Planner and Semrush. Our complete guide to keyword research can help you get started.
Your list of keywords and search terms should inspire an endless list of content topics related to them.
4. Schedule Blog Posts
For busy small business owners and marketers, planning out blog topics a few months in advance can be a good idea. It’s a great way to build discipline, keep order, and avoid the pressure of coming up with blog topics on the fly. If you know what you’re developing content about well ahead of time, it’s more likely you will create stellar deliverables the people in your target audience will engage with and act on.
Tip: You never know when you’ll come up with a great content idea. Keep a document on your smartphone where you document them. Then, you’ll have them handy when it comes time to create your content calendar.
5. Monitor Metrics
Regularly checking the metrics related to your blog performance can help you determine which topics prospective buyers care about and which they do not. It will arm you with the information you need to fix underperforming content, eliminate topics people don’t care about, and develop more material related to what resonates with them.
You can determine the effectiveness of your content by monitoring things like:
Time spent on page
Number of visitors to different pages
Number of additional pages people visit and what those pages are
Even if you have content topics mapped out months in advance, be bold enough to change out ones you find aren’t performing well through your data analysis.
Blog Content Ideas: The Final Word
Coming up with blog post ideas can seem daunting for busy small business owners and marketers. This is often because they don’t have a big-picture content plan, aren’t planning far enough ahead, and overthink things. Having a plan and focusing on blog topics related to your business that consumers care about makes the task easier and will help you develop material the people you’re targeting care about and will act on.
