Has this ever happened to you? You sit down at your computer, ready to write a brand new blog post. But staring back at you is a blank page. And suddenly, you don’t know what to write about anymore.
If you’ve been blogging or writing content for any length of time, chances are you’ve faced writer’s block. It happens to all of us.
Below, I’ve come up with five ways to eliminate writer’s block once and for all.
Ask your readers what you should write
Do you know what the most read email you’ll send to your list is? It’s the welcome email! Check your analytics right now and confirm it. (I’ll wait.)
You back?
Some welcome emails have open rates as high as 72%. However, most bloggers and content marketers aren’t taking advantage of it when it comes to planning content ideas.
Think about this. Someone comes to your blog, subscribes to your email list, and you send them an email that gives them the lead magnet you promised. This is all fine and good.
But, if you take the time to also ask the question: What would you like to learn more about when it comes to your blog topic, you’ll receive new content ideas every single day.
Steal Your Competitor’s Topics
One of the best ways to determine what to write about is to see what your competitors are writing about.
However, you need to do this strategically. Instead of just going to your competitor’s website and swiping their content ideas, you need to see which topics and blog posts are actually driving traffic.
One tool you can use to do this is Ubersuggest. All you would do is enter your competitor’s domain in the search bar.
Click on “view pages that drive traffic to this domain”.
And depending on the size of your competitor’s site, you’ll have dozens, if not hundreds of blog post ideas that are attracting your ideal customer.
Use Facebook Groups
One of my favorite places to find blog post topics is to go through the Facebook groups that I’m in. These groups are a hotbed of questions, engagement, and ideas for you to write about.
For instance, check out this post asking about webinars through Facebook live:
Notice how many comments it has. 65 comments is quite a bit for any group. Apparently, webinars through Facebook live is a topic people really care about.
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Can you rank your post
If you’ve gone through your competitor’s websites, asked your readers what they want to learn more about, and scrolled through Facebook groups, chances are you have more blog post ideas than you can handle.
Now it’s time to weed them down to those you want to write.
Search Engine Optimization has been the most important factor in my blog’s success over the past three years. One of the ways that I eliminate what posts we write about is getting an estimate for how hard it will be to rank the post on the first page in Google.
For instance, if you have a brand new site and one of your topics is dominated by sites that have been around for a long time, you may want to put that topic on the back burner. It is really hard for a new site to compete with existing sites.
But, if the topic you want to write about has a lot of newer, less established blogs ranking for it, then go for it.
One way to estimate whether a topic is possible to rank for is using Ubersuggest.
In the search bar, enter your topic idea or keyword.
Ubersuggest will give you an estimate of how hard it is to rank the keyword with an SEO difficulty score.
It goes from 1-100, with 100 being almost impossible.
Generally speaking, the lower the SEO difficulty score, the easier it is to rank the post. (Note: This is just an estimate. There are a lot of ranking factors to take into account, and no keyword difficulty score is totally reliable.)
Use a Blog Planner
One of the most critical tools in my toolbelt is a blog planner. At the beginning of every quarter, I make sure I know exactly what topics I want to write about and when I want them to be published.
If you plan your content in advance, you’ll never have to scramble at the last minute to figure out something to write.
In my company’s blog planner, I focus on a few things.
First, I identify which keyword I want to write about. This tells me exactly what I need to write. Then I make a note of the search volume of that keyword and make an estimate of how hard that post will be to rank in Google. Finally, I estimate the value the post will have for my business.
Once I have these key metrics down, I then set publishing dates for each of the blog posts and give some thought on how I plan on promoting the post.
That way, when the day comes to publish the post, I know what I’m going to write, how I’m going to promote the post, and the impact it will have on my business.
Over to you…
By implementing these five strategies, you are guaranteed to have more blog post topics than you can handle and never suffer from writer’s block again.