45 blog topic ideas for your small business
Whether you are new to blogging or a seasoned blog poster, continually coming up with ideas for blog posts is hard work. Maybe you are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of topics you could write about or perhaps you’re staring at a blank Word doc with no clue where to start or what would be interesting to your audience. The blogging struggle is real!
I have some simple advice for you to follow that will help you get started with writing your next blog. Read on!
Choose a general blog topic and a working title for your blog first.
Before you get excited and think that this simple idea is enough to enable you to write a killer blog post – hold fire for a moment. Blog titles are indeed the perfect place to start in your blog planning process, but this doesn’t replace the need for more in-depth planning which will ensure the final blog post is of high quality.
The good news is that this in-depth blog planning doesn’t need to be hard work. I have fine-tuned my blog briefing process and have produced a blog brief template which you can download for free here.
Simply complete the blog brief ahead of sitting down to write your blog post and you have a framework to follow which should help you to avoid blog writer’s block.
Planning is key to enable you to write sticky blog posts that delight your readers and keep them on your website. It also helps to ward off that sinking feeling of having a blog deadline to meet and zero ideas for content.
Let’s now get back to the task in hand…
How to research blog topics
There is a wealth of free online tools that you can use to research blog topic ideas for yourself. There are many paid services which include added features to help you research what competitors are doing and drill down into trends. For the purposes of coming up with blog topic ideas, these free resources are more than adequate.
My favourite tools for researching blog topics:
I love this tool and I use it pretty much daily. Ubersuggest has several functions available which can help you to understand how your website or blog are performing in terms of domain authority, SEO and backlinks. The part of the tool which I use for researching blog topics are the Keyword Suggestions and Content Ideas functions.
How to use Ubersuggest for blog topic research.
Go to the Ubersuggest home page and type in a broad topic that you are considering writing about, for example: “business advice”.
IMPORTANT: be sure to select the country that your website/blog is based in/targeting. The default is English / United States. I am based in the UK and therefore have to remember to change this to English / United Kingdom each time when researching topics for my own blog.
You will see an overview of the estimated monthly search volume for this term, how difficult it is to rank for this term in organic results, the difficulty to appear in paid search and the average cost per click.
Scroll down further and you will reach the list of keyword ideas. This is the section that can help you to come up with a topic and working title for your blog.
On the right-hand side, you will see a list of the top ranking pages for the keyword selected on the left. Here you can check out some of these articles to give you an idea of what is popular.
It’s important that you don’t plagiarise this content; I recommend you review these articles and aim to produce your own, BETTER version. Think of this exercise as content upgrading.
If you’re new to SEO, looking at this data will start to give you a better idea of the importance of domain authority, social shares and backlinks when it comes to getting your content ranking highly in search engines. I will cover the topic of SEO in more detail in a later blog.
Similar to Ubersuggest, if you go to the BuzzSumo home page you will be able to search for keywords to reveal a list of related suggestions. Unlike, Ubersuggest, BuzzSumo has a limit to the number of searches you can carry out for free. Try it out though!
Go to good old google.com and start typing your broad keyword. What happens next is Google helps you to complete your search query with popular searches. These popular searches can often provide inspiration for blog topics and long tail keyword phrases.
You may be able to go with one of Google’s suggestions as a working title for your blog or click through to these results to find content which you can also cover and improve upon. Again, no plagiarising please!
Use this research as a method for generating ideas for new, improved versions of existing content. You’ll find that many of these articles are over a year old (sometimes much older!). Here is your opportunity to upgrade these topics and when executed with other SEO tactics, you can start to rank for these topics and push the outdated content down the rankings.
Hopefully you will be able to take a look at these free tools and come up with some brilliant blog topic ideas that you feel inspired to write about.
If you are really pushed for time, here is my list of 45 ready-made blog post titles which you can jump straight in, grab, and run with. You’re welcome!
45 blog titles to adapt and use for your small business blog:
A step-by-step guide to …
The beginner’s guide to…
The advanced guide to…
A start-to-finish guide to…
The in-depth guide to…
An XX step guide to using…
A simple guide to…
How to use … to achieve…
The secrets to…
How to create…
Here’s why…
What you can learn from…
What will … look like in the future?
Where to find…
Why… and how to…
…mistakes that are…
Everything you need to know about…
Everything you need to know before…
When should you…?
An inside look at…
What is… and what should you…?
Is… better than…?
Why... is better than…
Here’s why… and how to…
Here’s why… sucks
Here’s why… is a good thing
An eye-opening guide to…
XX strategies on how to…
XX ways you can…
XX reasons why…
XX crazy facts about…
XX… mistakes and how to avoid them
XX mistakes to avoid when…
XX simple tactics that will…
XX rules for…
XX easy metrics to…
XX reasons why…
XX steps to launching…
Boost your… with…
Create more…by doing…
Become… by…
Sell more… with…
..vs… Which one works better?
…vs… a Guide to…
… made simple: XX steps to…
Conclusion
Choosing a blog topic can sometimes feel overwhelming and bloggers often struggle with writer’s block when faced with producing new content every week.
A tactic that I use to avoid getting stuck for words or blog topic ideas is to undertake some keyword research. Use the tools listed above to research your general blog topic and refine it into a working title.
I have provided the list of 45 adaptable blog titles to give you a head start with putting together that working title for your blog.
I’d love to read any blog posts that you write as a result of using this process – share them in the comments.
