5 Ideas for How to Overcome Blogger’s Block

Most business owners recognize the value of producing new content and regularly sharing it with their customer base. Blogging keeps you top of mind with past and current customers, helps you attract new leads and broaden awareness of your brand, improves your website’s placement in search results, establishes you as an authority in your industry, and helps you develop and communicate your brand’s personality.

However, there inevitably comes the moment when you finally have some time to devote to writing an article for your blog, only to find that you have no idea what to write about. Anyone who has had this experience can tell you that this feeling of writer’s block, or in this case blogger’s block, can be extremely frustrating. Next time you find yourself suffering from blogger’s block, rely on these 5 ideas to get your creativity flowing.

1. Keyword Planning

Use a keyword exploration tool, such as Google’s Keyword Planner or Moz’s Keyword Explorer to help you generate topic ideas. These tools not only provide ideas for new relevant keywords, they also show you data related to the volume of searches conducted per month, the competition, the bid price to land at the top of the page and more. Tools like BuzzSumo and Google Trends also provide insights into trending topics so you can keep a finger on the pulse of what people are sharing and talking about right now. Doing a little bit of background research on keywords before you start writing ensures that you choose a topic that people care about and that will hopefully draw more traffic to your site.

2. Generating Great Titles

When it comes to garnering views, your title can make or break a blog post. Think about it. When you’re scrolling your newsfeed looking for something interesting to click on, the featured image and the title of an article are generally what grab your attention and curiosity. This is why you should dedicate some time to perfecting your title.

If you’re someone who has no problem writing content but are stumped when it comes to generating a catchy title that will make people click on your article, then a little help with title generation may guide you toward the right path. Understanding the types of questions people tend to ask about your topic can help you write a title that answers the most common variants. For information about what people are asking about your blog topic, check out Answer the Public. For a tool that provides more specific title ideas, you may want to give BlogAbout’s Title Generator a try for inspiration.

Once you have a title in mind, get a second opinion on how powerful it is by using a title analyzer tool, such as Sharethrough’s Headline Analyzer. This tool scores the quality of your title using a research-backed algorithm trained on neuroscience and behavioral data. They also provide suggestions for small changes you can implement to improve the quality of your title, such as increasing the length of the headline or using more context words.

3. Repurposing Content

Do you have a video that you’ve produced that you could write a corresponding article about? Perhaps you’ve designed a powerful infographic about some aspect of your business that you could use as a jumping off point for a longer article. Maybe you have some recent statistics from your analytics data that you could expand on, explain the importance of, interpret and hypothesize about in a blog post. There are many examples of content that you can repurpose into the foundation for a new article. Some additional examples of content that you might consider repurposing include case studies, presentations, interviews, newsletters, podcasts, webinars, and ebooks.

4. Culling Your Analytics Data

Related to repurposing content is rewriting an article that you’ve posted in the past from a different perspective. The best candidates for this are articles that performed well the first time around. To identify these gold mines, check out your website’s analytics data to see whether any of your past posts have earned a standout number of views.

Once you’ve identified a gold mine topic, rewrite the article to target a different audience from the original post. For example, if your article about SEO for lawyers was a homerun, try writing an article about SEO for dentists or accountants. If you wrote an article about marketing written with the target audience of marketing managers in mind, perhaps you could rewrite it for C-suite targets. You can imagine that the resulting article would be quite different from the original, as C-suite individuals may not have the technical expertise to understand the nitty gritty marketing detail discussed in the original article. The C-suite version of this topic may focus more on marketing metrics and ROI measurement, or aligning marketing initiatives with overall business goals.

5. Soul-Searching

When all else fails, one of the best ways to come up with topics for your blog is to spend a bit of time reflecting on your business:

• What aspects of your business do you find most exciting or interesting?
• Do you have a share-worthy story about one of your favorite memories from the job?
• Have you ever had a face-palm moment while at work? What did you learn from the experience?
• What’s a question that you seem to get over and over again from your clients or customers?
• What’s happening in the world right now that is going to impact your industry or business and how?

There you have it: your guide for finding inspiration when blogger’s block strikes. The good news is that writing is like most skills in that you will improve with practice. So you just may find that the more articles you write, the easier the process becomes.

 

Courtney Turrin is VP of Data Science at Xponent21. Though gaining and sharing insights from data analytics is her primary passion, she also enjoys writing articles now and again, and she’s no stranger to blogger’s block. To learn more about Xponent21 and our digital marketing services, get in touch with us today.