Konnected

Creating new content for your corporate blog can be a challenging task, especially in a small business where the blog is not your first priority.  However by viewing your blog as a lead generation source you will be able to get in the routine of creating content for your blog on a regular basis.  So how do you find topics to write about and keep your funnel full of leads?

1. Read other blogs – Learn about what other blogs write about and find potential gaps in their content.  Duplicating what they already have won’t help in gaining subscribers or in ranking in the search engines.  Instead look at their general theme and look for potential topics they haven’t blogged on or write something only you can speak on because of your unique experiences or knowledge.

2. Use your web analytics – Perform some research on your web analytics data and look for trends in what visitors are reading when they are on your site.  If you see that there is a lot of interest in a specific topic, product, or service then you may want to write a blog post on how to use that product/service or how you have implemented that product or service for a customer.

3.Google Insights – You can use Google Insights to find historical data about potential blog posts.  By looking at trends you can find the best time to write about specific topics, products, or services.  For example when you search “boats” in Google Inisghts you would be shown the below image,

The chart for search traffic around “boats” looks very much like a text book business cycle chart, but what it tells you in your search for blog topics is that there is a month over month increase in traffic from the beginning of January through the beginning of August.  This would mean that you would be best served by starting to write posts in January and continuing on until August.  The “boats” example is pretty obvious but using Google Insights you can find micro-trends that you can take advantage of by writing posts when they are most popular. Google Insights

4.  Twitter Trends – You can analyze Twitter similarly to analyzing Google search trends.  By looking at when the interest in specific topics peak you can write and release new blog posts to capture the largest share of that traffic.  You can also look at topics and predict which topics are about to become more popular.  Look for topics that have gained interest over a short period of time and that you think are likely to grow more popular as the laggards begin to get involved.  Write blog posts about those topics and wait for the spike in traffic, having your blog post already posted and indexed by the search engines will help you in capturing the increased search volume on the social networks.  Trendistic , Twitter Search, Hash Tags

5. Email Data – When you send out your newsletter to your list monitor what topics or posts get the most traffic.  You can analyze which links receive the most clicks and write content around similar topic areas.  In contrast if no one is clicking to read more about a specific topic then you would be better served by allocating your writing time to topics your audience finds interesting.

Tags: blogging, Trends
Category : Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, blogging