Relevancy is essential for meaningful engagement. If people don’t find your blog posts relevant to their needs they are neither going to read them nor promote them.
A successful business blog requires regular posting. Your publishing schedule shouldn’t be intermittent – it should follow a consistent schedule. The problem with following a schedule is you constantly have to come up with relevant, interesting and well-written blog posts.
Many of my clients require me to send them a blog post every day and fortunately, most of them send me their own topics because they want to improve their search engine rankings (of course there are many others who pay me extra to come up with topics on my own). When they are not able to come up with topics they send me a basic idea of the wording and the keywords they would like to feature within the topics and then accordingly I create them.
You should constantly keep this in mind that whatever you publish on your blog it should help the readers. After reading every blog post they should go back enriched in one way or another. They shouldn’t feel like they wasted the time they spent reading your blog post.
How do you come up with relevant blog topics?
One way is to keep track of conversations going on on social networking websites like Twitter and LinkedIn, but mostly Twitter. I have created a separate column in Hootsuite for tracking conversations on all the niches on which I need to write regularly (content marketing, content writing, blog writing, etc., for instance, for writing on my own blog).
This Moz blog post titled 3 Steps to Identify Blog Topics That are Relevant to Your Audience suggests that you can also take ideas from popular blog posts on your own blog, but then of course for that you have to be publishing for a long time and you have to be having some popular blog posts. This is a good way of knowing for what people come to your website and what sort of blog posts they find useful.
Another suggestion is to take hints from your competitors’ websites. Although the Moz blog post advises you to use one of their own tools in order to track the performance of individual websites and links, you can also do this by manually visiting websites and going through the comments section. Normally popular blog posts attract way more comments compared to those that are not very popular. You can also gauge the popularity of a particular blog post if the publisher happens to use some social networking plug-in that shows how many times that link has been shared and recommended.
My favourite way of coming up with relevant blog topics for my audience is to maintain an ideas list. This list comes handy when you need to publish every day. You need to develop a habit of quickly jotting down ideas as soon as they come to your mind. You can use Evernote or any of the note-taking applications freely available. You can also use the voice recorder of your phone to quickly capture your thoughts.