The world of blogging is a never-ending road: you're always going to need more content, and more content and yet more content. How can you continually come up with new ideas, let alone keep them all relevant and fresh? It can be done. To help with the task, here are some tips for consistently coming up with new--and better--online content.
1. Look at what they are looking for.
Your blog's analytical or statistical tools should be able to tell you what posts are popular, what links people are clicking on and--perhaps most importantly for
blog content creation--the exact search phrases that brought them to your site. By seeing what people are looking for, you can write posts that give them exactly what they want. For instance, many search queries are in the form of a question; you can turn that question into a blog title and add to your
SEO authority on the subject.
2. Continue conversations from the comments section.
Another way of giving your readers what they want is to mine the comments section for ideas. If someone comments on a previous post with an additional insight, a further question or a challenge to what you have written, you may be better off turning your response into a separate post--especially if it would be rather long for the comment section. Feel free to also mine the comment sections of other industry blogs you follow, so you can provide a different take or a counterpoint to what they have posted.
3. Update old content."Recycling" something you have posted before might seem like cheating, or taking the easy way out. However, things change quickly these days, and that supposedly "evergreen" content you wrote a couple of years ago might now be a bit out of date. In that case, you
want it to be updated and re-posted, as a 2nd (or 3rd, or 4th) edition.
4. Use pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words--and may be useful even beyond that. Photos provide another thing for search engines to index, and another way for searchers to find your blog (by performing an
image search). A photo that clearly has something to say can sometimes stand alone as a blog post, or you can use it as a jumping-off point that gives you something to write about.
5. Give details on one of your products or services.Why not? If people buy it, that means they are interested in it in some way. You obviously want to sell it, and want to attract people who are looking for that product or service to your website. If a product is seasonal, or new, or improved, or simply has a big following, then you have a natural enough reason to blog about it. For most retailers, this tip by itself can fill all the holes in your content calendar.
