Let’s talk about how to do some self-discovery using these 5 blogging topic tips.
- What can you teach me? If you’re going to share with the world, make it worthwhile to everyone. Seriously, I don’t care about your personal interests unless I can learn something from it. I just want to know what’s in this for me. I know it sounds selfish but its true. I want to know your secrets. You know, things that make you an expert with something. Remember, you have to give to get, so cough it up!
- Help your neighboring business. You’re probably friendly with other business owners so why not pull together and help each other? Perhaps you can cross-promote events or simply write about the benefits of each others business. An easy way to do this is to do a “review” of their business, services, people, whatever, as long as it’s truthful and positive. If they don’t have a website or they’re not blogging – and they probably are not, don’t worry. Write about them anyway and tell them you’re doing so just for their approval. The idea is to get more content containing searchable keywords and phrases related to your town, plaza, city, services, etc. that not only make your site content more searchable, but also really add value to your content by sharing information useful to your readers. For example, If you are a salon and your neighboring business is a pizza shop, give a review of their food or employees while relating it to a personal experience related to your salon. Tell your readers how good it was when you had that pizza party during the holidays and what was taking place at the time.
- Write about local news and events in town. Local topics can drive traffic to your site very quickly. News events are often searched and indexed by search engines within minutes. The idea here is to take interest in happenings that may impact your business or someone else’s or maybe you just have valuable opinions or info to add to it.
- What should readers be warned about? Again, do you know something other may not or have a different spin on it? Great. Let others know as I mentioned in #1. However, to add spice and interest to it, talk about what potential problems could erupt unless they fully understand or do something. Warnings are looked at by everyone. That’s the idea: get attention. The word “warning” or “what not to do” are powerful headlines.
- Self-Promotion. Promoting your services or products in a blog are only valid blog posts if you already have a following. Basically, if you’re starting out, don’t do this. You can however create a compelling post that promotes by leveraging testimonials and stories from a third person’s point of view. Get someone else to write a guest article for you and make it into a blog post. This is a very common technique used by some of the biggest bloggers out there.
This should keep you busy for a little while. Also, be sure you’ve read my prior post on Blogging 101 – Starting from Scratch. Remember the moral of this post: adding blog posts to your blog is the same as adding fresh content to your website. The more often you do this, the more often search engines come back to get your updates. This help your website grow and build higher search results. So you see, it is a natural SEO tactic.