Running Out of Things to Blog About? 3 Tips to Get You Back on Track

In this content heavy market, blogs and reviews likely drive a large chunk of traffic to your site and sales from it. Unfortunately, this also means writing (or outsourcing) a steady stream of blogs for your website, which means you are working with limited resources. If you’re paying for your blogs, then unless they are making you more profit than they cost you to outsource, you’ll eventually run out of capital. If you’re writing your blogs, you’ll likely hit some dry spells where you don’t have any more good ideas for blogs (if you haven’t hit some already).

 

Three Techniques You Can Use to Create Fresh Blogs When Yours are Stale

For those that have run out of topics to blog about, take comfort in the fact that this happens to just about every internet marketer that doesn’t have a team of writers tirelessly wracking their brains for killer blog topics. So if you find yourself teetering on the brink of an empty tank, try these three techniques for refilling your think tank:

1. Play I Spy. Unless you are the only person or website in the world in your niche, in which case just say that in blog after blog since there’s no competition, you likely have saturated marketplace to deal with. While that’s difficult for any number of other reasons, for blogging purposes, it could be a goldmine.

Simply go on a little “spying” mission to your competition’s blogs and see what they are blogging about. This could give you inspiration in any number of ways, maybe you see things from a different perspective and find ways to differentiate yourself; maybe you think your competition is completely wrong and you can blog why.

Most importantly, see which topics have gotten the most social shares or comments, those are the topics that your demographic wants to read or talk about, meaning you need to be covering them. The point is, use your competition’s blog to not only stay relevant with everything that is going on in your niche, but also as some motivation to set your site up as more knowledgeable and authoritative than your competition’s. Do this through blogging.

2. Look Inside. After you look around you, you should start to have some inspiration or ideas for blogs. Now, take a look at your own personal journey as an internet marketer. Think about your successes and your failures, these are what interest people.

Without a personal spin or attachment to a blog, it simply reads as some research that some copywriter did and then threw together in a few minutes. You should have some sort of personal story to relay that shows why what you’re saying matters.

People want to learn from other people’s mistakes as well as follow in the footsteps of their success. Outline what went right or wrong for you, how and why it happened, and share what your readers should take away from that. (It helps if what they take away is whatever you’re selling, but not every blog has to be sales-driven.)

3. Use Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo is an amazing search engine that is geared towards filtering through the metrics and results of content marketing. You simply enter a search topic or keyword phrase and then find all of the content that’s been published on that topic or keyword.

You can filter by date, type of content (e.g. articles, interviews, giveaways, videos, infographics, etc.) and then see how many shares each link has gotten across the various social media platforms. This will help you keep your finger on the pulse of the industry as well as come up with fresh blog topics.

The Importance of Unique Relevant Content

No matter what type of website you have, for Internet Marketing there are 3 words that mean more than anything else

Content is King

These three words should be remembered at all times and used as a reminder that on site SEO (search engine optimisation) is just as important as off site SEO for two particular reasons:

Search engines do assess the quality of content and it can elevate your rankings

It is ultimately what will impress potential customers and encourage them to buy.

Although we are talking about improving your search engine rankings in this email, the second point is an important one to remember because your website should still be designed with your customers in mind. Online marketing should take care of the search engines.

The content you need is…

a) High quality,
b) Unique to your site
c) Relevant to the products and services you are attempting to sell. If it does not check all three points then you are getting it wrong.

High quality content will not be crammed with keywords but will instead contain keywords scattered in the text to remind search engines of its purpose. It will be well written, make sense and be completely unique.
Unique content is exactly what the label suggests so it should be written specifically for your site rather than copied from someone else’s site. There are tools you can use to make sure that your content is unique so investing in one of them may not be a bad idea.

Finally, the content on your site should always be relevant to the topic in question. For example; if you sell hardware goods then putting up content about women’s fashion is not a good idea. So what difference does it make?

Most people that are new to maintaining a website will dismiss content as one of the last things they need to worry about but this is simply not the case. Having relevant and unique content on your site can make a world of difference to your rankings. It fulfils many of the criteria set by search engine algorithm for high ranking and can also help to draw traffic to your site.

After all, visitors need to be able to find what they are looking for.

With all of this in mind, you really must take the time to look at the content on your site. You need to make sure that it is of a high quality as well as being unique and relevant. However, there is another aspect of content that you absolutely MUST consider.

The concept of fresh content Fresh content is not a difficult concept to grasp. In fact, it is pretty simple to understand so you should have no difficulty with it. It is literally adding more articles, information and other such content to your site on a regular basis.

There are plenty of ways that you can add fresh content on a regular basis but there are some that are more popular than others. For example, most major sites have a blog or an article section that content is added to whereas others choose to have an RSS feed added. Whichever you decide to do, you should update it at least once a month if not once a week to achieve the results you want.

Why add fresh content?

Now you know what fresh content is and how to add it, you need to consider why you need to put the time and effort in. Well, it is primarily to attract two things to your website:

Spiders -No, not the eight legged kind but rather the search engine kind. Spiders crawl your site to update your ranking periodically based on the content there. If you do not update your site then a search engine may well visit less frequently in future. If you update it regularly then you will find that spiders drop by and your rankings change on a more regular basis.

Humans – If you want to build trust and invite visitors to come back again and again then fresh content is the way to do it. It gives the impression that your customers mean a lot to you and can keep your visitor number and conversion rates high.

There is one other point that should be made about adding fresh content on a regular basis and that is the overall effect it has on your site. It helps to build authority. The more relevant and fresh content you add, the greater the authority your website seems to have on the topic. This not only improves your ranking but also increases the number of other people and companies that are willing to link to you.