If you’ve started a new blog (or your existing one has lost momentum) it can be difficult to come up with compelling content that attracts readers to your site and provides them with real value.
The following are some key steps you can take to consistently produce high-quality content for your audience.
Organize Your Ideas
Create a place to jot down all of your blog ideas. You can organize blog ideas in a simple spreadsheet, Word document, or cloud-based platforms like Evernote or Dropbox. This makes it easy to access your list from anywhere.
Over time, you’ll build up a comprehensive list of blog ideas that will keep you blogging for years to come.
Survey Your Audience
One of the best ways to find out what readers need most is to simply ask them. Turn to your clients to identify what information they find most useful.
Visit your social media platforms to see the posts that people respond to the most. This will give you great ideas for future content.
If you publish a newsletter, use it as an opportunity to ask your clients what they’d like to see in upcoming blog posts. This is one of the simplest and overlooked ways to come up with great ideas for your blog.
Leverage Existing Content
Your website, offline marketing materials, social media posts, and other content touches on the many areas of the services you provide. Reviewing your existing content inspires new ideas that are perfect for future blog posts.
You can also repurpose old blog articles. If an old post needs an update based on recent changes in the legal field, create a new post addressing the topic from a different angle or build on the last one.
Your most popular posts are great for repurposing since you know that readers have responded positively to a given topic in the past.
Comments from readers on your blogs help you determine the topics that are relevant to their needs. There may be some recurring questions that readers have that you could address.
Current Events
Consider how a current event affects your clients and blog readers. What sort of questions or opinions might they have? How can you shed light on the issue in a way that compels your audience to see you as an authority?
Trade publications and journals provide the latest information related to a given industry. They can help you create content on issues that haven’t been addressed by your competitors.
Look to Competitors
Your competitors are a great source of blog ideas. See what content they’re providing. More importantly, what content are they not offering readers? This will identify gaps in the content pool that you can help fill.
You can see what comments are made on competitors’ blogs to get a better understanding of what readers are looking for and what topics interest them the most.
Automate Your Blog Ideas
You can use Google Alerts to be notified anytime content is published on a given topic or keyword. You’ll receive regular email notifications that bring great blog ideas right to your inbox.
Another way to automate the idea generation process is to subscribe to blogs through RSS. Use an RSS reader such as Feedly to follow relevant blogs on a daily basis. Scan the headlines regularly and you’ll never be short on ideas for your blog.
Coming up with great ideas for your industry blog can seem overwhelming. But putting these tips into practice ensures that you’ll never be short on compelling topics for your blog.
Over time, you’ll build one of the most valuable assets to your business: a blog that provides value to your current and future clients.
Let us know what strategies have helped you publish blog articles that drive traffic to your legal website. If you need help developing a strategy for your blog, let us know in the comments below so that we can help you build a powerful blog for your law practice.
