How to Choose Great Content For Your Blog

Tips For Choosing the Most Effective Content For Your Blog Posts

You’ve gone through the web design checklist for your site. You’ve decided on a color scheme, and logo. You’ve created a site that can be easily navigated, and you have a domain name that can be easily remembered, too. And now, you’re planning on adding regular blogging in an effort to draw more traffic to your website. Whether you choose to write your blogs in-house, or opt for a ghostwriter to create regular blog posts for your company, the key to ensuring that your blog posts actually help your business lies specifically in the content you choose.

How do you pick the perfect content for a blog post?

Picking content topics for a blog doesn’t have to be as complicated or difficult as you may think. When it comes to blogging, there are two primary types to choose from: trending topics and evergreen topics. Most any subject you choose should fall under one of these categories.

1. Trending Topics are those subjects that are popular right at this moment. They typically draw significant traffic to your site in the short period of time following your post, but then will decrease in popularity as the content becomes outdated.
2. Evergreen Topics (sometimes referred to as ‘library blogs)are those posts that will remain popular now, and in the future. These blog posts will consistently perform well over a long period of time.

Within these two blogging categories, there are many different purposes that influence your blog theme that you may choose from. Educational blogs include ‘how-to’ themes, professional and/or personal advice, and even tutorials, for instance. Personal interview blogs are rather self-explanatory. Review blogs may cover a wide variety of subjects that seek consumer approval. But, no matter what the purpose, your topic will either be one that attracts high traffic volume for a shorter period of time, or it will have a long shelf life, never really becoming outdated by more popular subjects.

Both blog types can prove extremely effective for your website when written properly and used correctly. It’s important not to focus so much on one that you neglect the other. Evergreen topics provide your site with a wide variety of information that your visitors could search for, and rely on, at any given time. Trending topics allow you to connect with “what’s hot and now” in the world of your potential clients. But, no matter what type you choose for your next blog post, be sure that your topic is relevant, interesting, useful, and unique.

Once you decide what type of blog to write, your next step is to pick a topic that visitors will actually want to read. If you’re having trouble coming up with a subject, just ask yourself these three questions:

1. Who are your customers within your target audience?
2. What topics would your specific customer base be interested in reading about?
3. How do you make those topics remain relevant over time?

Once you’ve settled on a blog topic that you’re proud to share with your readers, be sure to promote your blog on relevant social media sites. Social sharing through tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+ is a terrific way to increase your blogs’ readership and expose your business and website to a wider audience.

As you begin to establish a lengthy collection of blog posts on your website, be sure to maintain your blogs on a regular basis with the use of content marketing software (or a marketing agency that can handle this for you). This will help to ensure that your site doesn’t become old news to your loyal visitors.

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By Ken Franzen

President / Co-Founder of Neon Goldfish