While you may already be enjoying success with your business, you may wonder how you can improve your small business marketing. If you don’t already have a blog, starting one can work wonders when it comes to the effectiveness of your digital marketing. Whether you have a blog or you’re planning to start one, adding fresh, relevant content that’s meaningful to the members of your target audience is an absolute must.
It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Starting a blog or continuing on with your current one by adding new content doesn’t seem too challenging, after all. The truth is, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover in this context. Having a blog that resonates with your visitors is hard work. And it’s even more difficult in those instances where you’re struggling to come up with topics for your posts.
Don’t be fooled. Even the most talented content marketers have difficulty identifying subjects that will interest readers at least occasionally. For this reason, it’s important to develop several sources for topic ideas that are outside of your own head.
Where to Turn for Blog Post Topics
Luckily, you have a wide variety of resources you can turn to when you’re in a desperate search for topics for your blog posts. Even if your search hasn’t reached the level of desperation yet, you can take a lot of pressure off your shoulders when you sense writer’s block may soon cause a fog that will prevent your creative juices from flowing freely by knowing where to look for ideas.
Previous Blog Posts
Your previous blog posts are often great sources for new subjects to write about. Use a tool like Google Analytics to identify your most-read blog posts. Read through them and look for any subheadings or bullet points you can expand upon in a separate post. You should look for opportunities to discuss the same topic in a different light as well.
Comments
If you haven’t enabled comments on your blog, you could be missing a wonderful opportunity to find topics for your posts. By allowing – and encouraging – people to leave comments, you’re giving your readers the opportunity to do more than share their opinions. You’re giving them the chance to tell you what they’d like you to discuss in future posts.
Sales Team
Remember – your small business marketing should support your sales team seamlessly. This means you should ask your salesmen and women what your actual clients want to know. Ask your sales force about the questions they’re asked most often, the things they sell more than others and whether they’ve noticed any new trends during their rounds. You can use the information they share to create new topics for your posts.
Customer Service Representatives
It’s likely that your customer service representatives interact with your customers more often than anyone else on your payroll. They talk to people who want to buy the things you sell and they resolve problems for shoppers who are frustrated for some reason. By talking to your customer service reps, you can get new topic ideas and address pain points directly in your content.
Topic Ideas You Can Use as Early as Today
Even when you know where to look for new topics, it can still be a chore to come up with ideas for posts. Sometimes, your creative well will still be dry no matter how hard you work the pump. When that happens, it’s helpful to rely on some tried and true ideas that will work well across industries.
How-To Posts
A how-to post is almost guaranteed to be well-received by your audience. That’s because people use the Internet to find answers to their problems and learn how to do things. And those are two things that how-to posts are designed to do.
Did your support staff tell you that a considerable number of people are asking how to use one of your products? Prepare a how-to post that explains how consumers should use the item to enjoy the best experience possible.
Lists
Creating a list is another sure-fire way for a blog post to earn attention, especially if you put a number in the post’s title. Having a number in the title implies that the post is skimmable, which many readers prefer. While you may be tempted to limit yourself to top 10 lists, don’t. Including an unusual number of points in your list can be an effective way to make your post stand out in a sea of top 10 lists.
Checklists
Although a checklist is a type of list, checklists deserve being mentioned separately. That’s because they’re usually more practical when it comes to your readers using them. In general, checklists include a number of things that need to be done in order to complete a task.
If you run a moving company, you can create a checklist people can use to move from one location to another without missing a beat. An owner of a party rental business might want to prepare a checklist for people who want to throw the perfect party.
Tips, Tricks and Best Practices
Preparing posts that provide tips, tricks and best practices is a great way to share content viewers will find meaningful because the advice you give can help them achieve a goal of some sort. If you run a health food store, you can share tips and tricks to reduce belly bloat. The owner of a fitness center may want to provide some best practices for training for a marathon or triathlon.
Buying Guides
The usual purpose of a buying guide is to provide advice that will help consumers make an educated decision when they’re getting ready to make a purchase. A buying guide is an effective tool you can use to let people know about your top sellers and inform them about the complementary purchases they can make.
Musselwhite Marketing: Your Source for Endless Blog Post Ideas
If you want your blog to include posts about things that are relevant and meaningful to your target audience but simply can’t come up with fresh ideas, you should take advantage of the creative services our content marketing agency offers. We create blog posts for small and midsize businesses in an array of industries, and we’ll be happy to craft posts for your organization.
Contact Musselwhite Marketing to schedule a discovery session with our digital marketing experts now.

Linda Musselwhite
Linda Musselwhite is an author, speaker and co-owner of Musselwhite Marketing (est 2009). Linda’s previous positions as Human Resources Administrator. Combined with extraordinary customer service makes her the obvious choice of day to day operations for Musselwhite Marketing.
Connect with Linda on LinkedIn.