Top 5 Blog Topic Brainstorming Tips

If you’ve recently launched a company blog, or are discussing it within your marketing department, one of the hardest aspects is generating interesting and valuable blog topics on a regular basis. Here are five quick tips that will help your blogging team promote your business online. 

1. Define a content strategy with customer personas 

This should be the first thing your company does before even thinking about actual, concrete blog topics. Your content strategy will also include ebooks, white papers and reports, webinars, videos and other content items that you’ll host on your website. It will define how often you blog, where you share the content, and, most importantly who your audience is.

Create at least three customer personas – we’ve explained how to do that here, and give you some examples here. Brainstorming topic ideas will be many times easier and more productive when you can consider your customers’ pain points, challenges, personalities, and other relevant characteristics.

2. Divide blogs by structure and format 

As part of your content strategy, establish the kinds of blog articles you want to provide for your audience based on their personas.

Blog articles come in many varieties, and you should ensure an even mix of your chosen types:

• List – Typically round-ups of statistics, but anything with a bulleted list. These are easily digestible and usually quick to produce.
• News – An article announcing the latest news from your company or industry, relevant to your business activities and audience.
• Interview or Q&A – Find someone interesting and ask them some questions. This is great content that’s easy to produce, and most people will be happy to talk to you in exchange for a little promotion.
• Opinion – These work best when they’re written by someone who can best represent your company and give it a human face and voice. 
• Top Tips – An article just like this. Short, simple, actionable advice is very popular.
• In-depth – Something more journalistic in style with further research, interview quotes, and references, all revealing something of importance to your readers. 

If you have a diverse audience, you’ll find that some are more versed in what you’re writing about than others. Be sure to provide introductory, intermediate and advanced blog content and label it accordingly. We tag our blog articles according to these same skill categories. 

4. Turn one idea into many

When a great idea surfaces, don’t immediately write it up – that could be a wasted opportunity. Instead, take a moment to run it through your content strategy and specifically the three points above.

Can you create one main article with two or three shorter, supporting articles? For example, would this article benefit from something more in-depth, or a Q&A from a well-known blogger on how they themselves brainstorm?

Expand one idea into many and spread them out across your schedule or editorial calendar.

5. Create a mind map of your customers’ pain points

This is one that has worked very well for us. Sit down with the people within your company who regularly interact with your customers – most likely your sales team.

Now, write down all the questions you’re normally faced with when approaching potential customers. Each pain point will generate multiple blog topics that can be addressed in many different ways.

We use MindNode Pro, but there are many other similar mand mapping applications available such as MindMeister and XMind. They vary in features provided and complexity, but basically allow you to create a visual representation or map of pretty much any thought process. In this example, you want to start with your customer personas in the centre or at the beginning of your map, then branch out into the questions that illustrate their challenges and reservations, followed by relevant blog topics on the final level of your map. You should end up with a map that looks like a tree of words and ideas.