Coming up with niche blog topics is no easy task, even when you have the most exciting subject in the world to cover. It can be even more challenging when you’re writing for a business niche or industry that is considered dry or (gasp) boring!
The best thing you can do to set yourself and your business up for success is to develop a comprehensive content strategy that targets your audience personas.
How to come up with niche blog topics your audience will love
Here are some tips and considerations you should integrate into your content ideation process.
Consider your audience
Who are you looking to attract with your content? New customers or existing customers? If you’re hoping to tune new customers into your brand, focus on the top of the funnel, or the awareness stage, which is the first step to growing your customer base.
While keeping current customers engaged in your business ensures long-term relationships, building awareness is mostly about attracting new customers.
Figuring out which new customer base you’re interested in attracting will help you shape your content and engage with them more effectively. Think of it like this: even a boring subject is not boring to a person interested in it!
Pro tip: if you want to attract new customers consider doing client showcases or publishing case studies on your website and tagging your clients’ businesses on social media. Make sure you choose their most interesting or visually appealing content to highlight.
Speak from experience when coming up with niche blog topics
Have you ever read an article and found yourself losing interest because the writer does not know what they are talking about? Reading content from an inexperienced writer can feel like a chore, so you should make sure you’re working with your team and content writers to make each piece authentic, valuable, and interesting for your target audience.
This is even more critical when it comes to niche blog topics. Having someone who has studied or spent a fair amount of time working in the field will have more to offer on the subject and will be able to make the content even more potent.
Leveraging your team’s strengths and experience and asking them to share their passions and interests will allow you to have greater success with your blog topics.
Research your topics
According to CareerFoundry, the ideation phase is a “key transitional step from learning about your users and the problem to coming up with solutions.” Some of the largest companies in the world invest heavily in having a team of people ideate, but ideation is not only for Fortune 1000 companies.
Ideation is a step you should include in your content process after establishing who your audience is and what you’re hoping to achieve with your content.
Content ideation can come in many different forms, from bringing your business stakeholders together for a brainstorming session to doing trends and SEO research on commonly searched keywords and phrases in your industry.
One of the most effective ways to ensure you create effective and impactful content for your current audience and a new audience you may be looking to attract is to use keyword research tools.
When you can understand your audience’s search intent, you more easily match your content up to that intent and attract people looking to buy your goods or services.
Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs help you quickly determine whether a topic has a fair amount of interest and, based on keyword difficulty, how challenging it would be for your content to rank organically in the search results. There are also free keyword tool options you could use.
Use a content calendar
In addition to keyword research, you should also use a content calendar to plan your niche blog topics. If you can generate creative content ideas based on globally-known events and holidays or big sale times of year for your industry, you may be able to maximize the impact of your content and generate more interest, even if your niche is considered to be boring.
Utilizing a regular desktop or Google calendar could suffice for this, or, if you’re looking for a collaborative digital tool that you can involve key stakeholders on, consider using an application like Airtable.
This will allow you to keep track of important dates and share content notes and ideas around what makes that day important and worthy of integrating into your overall blog strategy.
You also want to be mindful of current events when it comes to your content strategy. Even with a boring niche, staying up-to-date with trends and popular references, and sayings will help your brand stay relevant and show your current and prospective clients that you are up-to-date and in the know with the latest happenings in your industry.
Also, consider creating content around your industry’s trade shows and expos throughout the year as new products in the space could make for great blog topics.
Be thorough in your content
You’ve invested time and money into building a content strategy that serves current and new audiences. Now that you’ve engaged them, you want to make sure to go beyond the surface with your niche blog topics.
Being thorough in your content helps build reliability with your audience and show new audiences you’re a trusted source on the subject. You want to establish yourself as an “expert” in your industry and have customers associate your name with a deep understanding of your field.
Being in-depth doesn’t have to mean being long-winded. Here are a few suggestions for how to be thorough without boring your audience, no matter your niche:
- Use data to tell a story: Supporting your content with data helps shape a more interesting and compelling message. If you’re able to, use data visualizations to add imagery and showcase meaningful elements. Sisense has great examples of different types of data visualizations and a breakdown of which ones to use for different types of information.
- Break down those walls of text: Include all the most important information about your niche blog topics, but use illustrations, embeds, and headers to break up long text blocks. You could also use retweets, quotes, images, memes, and GIFs to make the content even more engaging.
- Answer questions: Sometimes a Q&A format is an easy-to-read method for covering a topic thoroughly. Include an FAQ section at the end of each of your blog posts and be sure to use the right schema for it for a chance to get into the structural snippet on Google.
No matter your niche, finding inspiration for your blog topic can be easier than you think. At its core, your content should seek to do two things: educate customers and solve customer pain points. If you’re able to use funny or creative blog topics that accomplish those things, you’ve hit the mark and have likely engaged your audience in a meaningful way.
Use previous successes to inform future topic selection
Your content strategy process does not end once your content is published or promoted in emails, newsletters, or social media. The world of digital content is always evolving, and your own strategy should include monitoring the success of the content you have published.
Pro tip: Place tracking on your blog posts to have data on which articles lead to conversions. This will help you know what’s working to increase your conversions and revenue, giving you data you can use to fuel content choices in the future.
If you still feel stuck, consider turning to ClearVoice. We have hundreds of experts in niche blog topics around the world that can help you shape your content strategy. Talk to a content specialist today to learn more.
