If you have a business you want to see thrive, the question that inevitably needs answering is how to ensure people find, stay and come back to your website and how to convert them into customers. While many factors come into play, such as the quality of your website, products and/or services you offer, a very important aspect is blogging, social media, and other search engine tactics.
Search engines are getting smarter, so if you have a blog, your website has more chance to appear higher in the search engine result pages. And yet – not all blogs are created equal!
Once they decide to start blogging, the ultimate question for many people seems to be what to blog about.
First thing we’d like to emphasize is that what increases visitor/consumer engagement, market share, and eventually revenue growth is blogging with a purpose.
We put together a list of 10 types of blog topics and approaches that will get your blogs noticed:
1. “How To” Guides
Generally, people don’t like reading long, boring instruction manuals, and instead – they use Google to figure out how to do stuff.
Find your niche audience, cater to their curiosities and questions, offer helpful answers in an easy-to-follow, interesting way, and voila – you’ve created what can become a popular blog.
Before you can convince your audience that you are an expert on something, it’s a good idea to start with 101 beginner guides – they’re often the way to build organic search traffic in the beginning. One of the ways you can do that is by using infographics.
2. Advanced Guides
People are always seeking out the most credible guides, or Essential Guides, Complete Guides, Uncensored Guides – and the thing to remember is that whenever you’re writing an informative guide, you need to back it up with statistics.
Adding data to your guides shows your audience your content is legitimate, so you absolutely have to only use data from authority sources, and give credit for the information.
It takes time to conduct research first and then form and opinion based on your findings. If you’d like to perform original research, you can highlight your case studies in a blog post – this can help you get traffic from organic searches, and through backlinks every time another site uses your case study as a source of information.
3. FAQ’s
Posting answers to frequently asked questions serves as a resource for people, and while they’re often featured on e-commerce websites, they tend to be overlooked on blogs.
Google’s algorithm uses FAQs, questions, and other popular topics as part of its Knowledge Graph, and using FAQ’s in blogging may bring you a top spot in this desired place.
4. Personal Stories
Although you always want to include keywords when possible, personal stories, while not rich with keywords, are still valuable additions to your blogging.
Sharing personal stories will give your readers a chance to relate to your business on a personal level – and this surely helps build brand affinity.
The more you master the skill of storytelling, the more the quality of your blog posts improves.
A fun fact: when readers have an emotional response to a story, dopamine gets released from their brains. So remember – the best stories are written to elicit some type of emotion. Whether you want your readers to feel sad, surprised, joyful, compassionate, angry, or moved while they’re reading your posts, you can make people feel emotions, which in turn will make them more likely to continue reading the blog.
As a result, they’ll come back to read more in the future. It may also trigger or awaken readers and prompt them to take action, which may very well be to seek your products or services.
5. Charity and Activism
It’s always a great idea to blog about charitable actions, events, or activism you support and respect.
Anything that appeals to the good in people, and shows you’re active in your communities and beyond can build your readership and help the brand image.
6. Productivity Tips
People are always looking for tools, technology, or tips to help them get more done, faster – and productivity tips are the gold of many online blogs.
In today’s super busy world, time is of the essence; so, if we told you we could help make your days more spacious, and you’d have more time and energy to accomplish more, you’d be interested, right?
It makes sense we are all attracted to content focused on creating more time and being more efficient.
You can blog about interesting productivity tips and tie it into how your products or services increase productivity; or you can share from a more personal angle and talk about productivity tips and tricks that are working for you.
7. Wellness and Food
We are all looking to stay healthy and improve our health by seeking ways to enhance our overall well-being. From exercise routines that really work, to meditation and other ways to deal with everyday stress and challenges, blogging about various topics that are helpful and inspiring can draw a large audience.
And, yes, this includes recipes. They are a great way to draw traffic to your blog. People love food, and there’s always a new diet, a new interesting ingredient to explore and new recipes to be shared. Featuring delicious recipes with inviting images is a great attraction.
8. Finances
One of the most sought after and successful blog topic is money and finances.
The Internet is chock full of people looking to improve their finances, get out of debt, plan for the future, etc.
James Clear, for example, typically writes about health and productivity, but he knows that money topics will hit a social sharing streak.
9. Infographics
Incorporating visual content into your blog posts is essential. Now, you can take this strategy to the next level by publishing blog posts that are mostly infographics.
Basically, what you do is put relevant, accurate info and statistics about your niche and industry together, and use them to create eye-catching infographics to share in your blogs.
Other websites will want to share your visually-appealing infographics, and you’ll get credit for the image source. Plus, people who see your infographics on other sites may be drawn to visit your website via the included links, and these links will also improve your SEO ranking.
If you’re not savvy at creating infographics, hire someone to create them for you, then Include them in new blog posts with the commentary about the facts and statistics within the post. Don’t forget to encourage sharing by providing an easy link for people to use.
10. Success Stories
You connect more deeply with your audience by giving them information about your business practices and processes that have brought you success.
People enjoy feeling like they are privy to special knowledge, and sharing what’s really worked for you shows that you are caring, transparent and authentic, which all resonates strongly with readers.
Also, this can include sharing the lessons you’ve learned and a chance for you to open up and be more real for your audience.
Blogs can be a subtle yet effective form of successful advertising, and investing in blogging for your business is one of the most impactful and cost effective things you could do within your Internet marketing strategies.
And if blogging is not your forte, worry not – at RODA marketing, we are professional bloggers who can add great value to your online business.
Contact us and learn about blogging, search engine optimization and web design today.