10 Legit Ways to Come Up with Blog Post Topics
A great blog title makes all the difference if you want your blog post to be read. Current statistics show that only two out of 10 people read more than your title. So come up with blog post topics so engaging that readers just can’t turn away.
And it’s not easy. The pressure mounts when you think about stats from online publishers that say readers are 500 percent more likely to read your blog and enter your website when the title that attracted them is viral-worthy. That’s a high bar.
As If Writing Isn’t Hard Enough
Now you have to spend as much time — and sometimes even more — coming up with your blog post title as you do writing the darn thing. And if you’re not a natural, writing can be excruciating. But as with all things that have to do with online content — the stats can be a bit intimidating. So much so, that they can lead to analysis paralysis.
Anything you do to promote your company shouldn’t be so difficult. Marketing can be fun if you follow a few tips to come up with blog post topics that will at least put you in the running with the competition out there clamoring for the eyes of your customers.
10 Tips to Successfully Come Up with Blog Post Topics
At Ray Access, it’s part of our job to come up with blog post topics for our clients. While this service certainly is valuable and we’ve charged for it in the past, we’ve decided it makes a better value-added piece to our gold-standard services. And since we don’t charge extra for it, we better be good at it — otherwise, we’d have to spend all day coming up with blog post titles, and that’s time we couldn’t charge!
To make this blog worth your time, here are a few secrets to our special sauce to come up with blog post topics on a regular basis:
- Collaborate. There’s nothing like brainstorming with another person or a group of people to get those ideas sparking in your head. It seems like they feed on each other.
- Read the news. You can’t very well tap into a top news item that’s trending wildly if you don’t read the news. Whether you listen to the radio, peruse the headlines on a couple officious news sites or get a daily paper, know what’s going on in the world around you.
- Run a tab. When your mind’s at rest and not forced to think about anything specific, it can come up with some pretty cool ideas. Jot down those super ideas when they come because you can’t expect them to be quickly available when you need them.
- Listen to the pros. Companies like Moz and Google provide you with plenty of statistics to aid your topic search. Things like using numerals instead of writing out numbers help, as does looking up “word of the day” trends to boost your title base.
- Talk to your readers. The word “you” is the number one most popular word used in searches. Ray Access learned that writing to an audience personalizes each piece — readers feel like you’re talking directly to them.
- What’s it all about? Don’t make readers work for their payoff. Sure, catchy witticisms become obvious once a reader gets into the content of your blog, but they don’t work in a title. Topics that begin with “how to” “top,” and “why you should” tell the reader what to expect.
- Go long. Studies show now that long-string titles with 16 to 18 words are the most popular. They give readers the most information about what they can expect in the blog and have a better chance of answering a query.
- Drop the descriptions. Save the flowery descriptions for the body of your blog post. Spend most of your title real estate using verbs and adverbs that actually serve as calls to action.
- Drop the salesy language, too. Putting your company name in a blog title or using that line to make announcements or promote sales is a turn-off for readers. You’ll get more sympathy than readers for appearing so desperate.
- Mix it up. The last thing you want from your readers is to be boring. After all, they look good when you give them hot, trendy titles to repost. Don’t come up with blog post topics that are all questions; add one in occasionally (about 11 percent of the people like to click on questions).
And when you really don’t want to deal with the subject of titles or spend the time to come up with blog post topics — let alone writing them — contact Ray Access. We love a challenge.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
