Whether you’re looking for a great way to communicate with your customers or you’re looking for new ways to energize and stimulate your thinking, starting up your first business blog can have some serious benefits.

It’s your most valuable tool when it comes to giving your small business a voice. It can inspire as you put down ideas and kindle your thoughts. For a new business, it helps you tell the story of who you are, what you do and why you do it. Simply, a business blog lets your business personality shine.

If you’re still not confident whether to start a blog or not, take a look at these statistics and consider the benefits which content can have in your business:

– 58% of Marketers Have Acquired Customers from their Blog
– 82% of Consumers say they like reading content from brands
– 48% of Consumers say content makes them feel more positively towards a brand

Yet nevertheless, if there is one thing for certain, blogging is no easy task. It takes time – something that a small business owner lacks. It takes research – aka more time. And it takes a lot of hard work – something a small business owner is an expert in, but may not necessarily have the time for.

So how do you go about blogging? Where do you find ideas? And how do you avoid becoming part of the 90% of businesses who leave their blog behind within 3 months? There is no one single answer, and the only truth in blogging is that it takes time and ideas for a blog to become truly successful.

Thankfully, there are some ways we can combat inspiration drought or a drop of blogger’s block. In this post we hope to share our thoughts on where to find your blogging inspiration and how to create blog content when the first bumper pack of ideas dries up.

Why are you blogging and where to start?

The first step in developing a blog is figuring out your content strategy. Are you just going to turn the laptop on late one Saturday night and burst out 1000 words on the first topic that comes to mind? Of course not. You need to define your reason for blogging. Answer these important questions.

What are you trying to achieve?

Who exactly is my blog for?

Are you trying to drum up more business or are you trying to building relationships with your customer?

Answering these questions will give you a better idea of the content you want to create, where to find inspiration for it and a content strategy to refer to.

Let’s say you are a new bespoke wedding supplier and your main reason for blogging is that you want to provide interesting content, that your customers can use when planning their wedding.

First you start with: Wedding Planning. It’s such a broad term and can literally cover many aspects of the wedding planning process. By breaking it down into the main categories that cover wedding planning, you can start to gather a list of questions your ideal readers may be asking. Here’s one I made earlier…

Breaking it down into the 5 categories I have now found 20 Questions which I believe my audience may be asking, on the subject of planning a wedding. I will now have, with a little research and tweaking, 20 blog topics to fill out my content strategy and plan.

Planning a Wedding…
What do I need to know?
How to Plan a Spring Wedding?
How to Plan a Summer Wedding?
How to Plan an Autumn Wedding How to Plan a Winter Wedding?
How much does a Wedding Cost?
What are the priority items of a Wedding?
How much should I budget for Wedding Stationery?
Wedding Etiquette Priorities?
Planning a Wedding at Home Tips?
Top Tips for Planning a Wedding at the Beach?
Wedding No-No’s for a Garden Wedding?
Questions to ask an Event Venue?
Venue checklist?
Questions to ask before buying a Wedding Dress?
Spring Wedding Dress Styles?
How far in advance should I buy my Wedding Dress?
Groom Attire: Rent or Buy?
When should you send out: Save the Date Cards, Wedding Invitations and Thank You Cards?
Floral Ideas for Different Themed Weddings?
Tips for Hiring a Wedding Caterer?
Do I need a Wedding Planner?

Using Buzzsumo to Find Content Ideas.

As you can see above… it’s quite a generic list of questions with a broad number of answers. To help break this down and make writing the blog post easier, we can pull out the niche questions within these broader questions. For example: How to Plan a Summer Wedding? Can turn into…

Using the above I can spring off some possible questions a Bride or Groom may ask under this topic. I created the above within 5 minutes and now I have the potential for 4 blogs.

My next step is checking the viability of the blog post. You should be thinking…

What competition will the post have?

Is it something I’m sure my audience will be interested in?

Is it something that receives a good number of shares across social media?

To answer these questions I use a tool called Buzzsumo. A revolutionary tool which can analyse the number of shares a piece of content has received across social media.

So going back to my above spider chart, you may be thinking about creating a blog for ‘summer wedding decor’. It’s something you have been working on with a Bride & Groom recently and you believe it may be something your audience might be interested in. Using the tool Buzzsumo you can now type in the phrase and examine the results.

As you can see from the above Buzzsumo search for the phrase ‘Summer Wedding Décor’ – the phrase or articles written around ‘Summer Wedding Décor’ doesn’t seem to be a great topic for receiving shares across social media. Using the results we can assume this subject may not be of the greatest interest to our audience.

Going back to our list of questions we can breakdown another question to find a viable blog topic. This time I’m going to look at How to Plan a Winter Wedding?

Using Buzzsumo, again we can check the viability in terms of social shares for each of these blog subjects. This time I searched for Vintage Weddings Ideas.

Using the data provided for us by Buzzsumo from the search Vintage Wedding Ideas we can see articles covering this topic have received in excess of 40,000 shares in the last 6 months. Thus, this search has shown it is a highly popular topic and one that we may be interested in providing for our audience.

I can then repeat this process with various different search terms and gather up 3 or 4 of the most popular blog posts on the subject of vintage weddings.

You should be left with something like the above. The three articles on the left are the most popular articles on the internet (via Social Shares) for various topics covering Vintage Wedding Ideas.

Your aim is to now make a better post than each of those articles. Even better is when you can consolidate an article that is better than all three of the above articles.

The key is to find topics that you know your customers will want to read. By analysing the number of shares particular topics receive through Buzzsumo, you should be able to gauge the type of articles your audience will want to read. If you can then create better blogs than the top shared articles on Buzzsumo you can be sure you are on the right track. Simply take inspiration from the above and aim for something that comes out on top compared to the rest.

Another great use of Buzzsumo when creating content is, the ability to compare your competitors best content. If you have a similar target market to competitors and you know their blog content is pulling in readers and engaging your audience, you can use Buzzsumo to find their most popular content.

Let’s say you have two or three popular competitors in the Wedding Industry. For our explanation we will choose three of the biggest online wedding magazines: Brides, Bridal Guide and Wedding Ideas Magazine. Using Buzzsumo we can now pop in their domain and gather a list of their most popular blog topics.

Brides – Buzzsumo Search

Bridal Guide – Buzzsumo Search

Wedding Ideas Magazine – Buzzsumo Search

Now, by analysing each of your competitors you should be able to gather ideas on why their content has been successful and the type of topics you should be aiming to deliver – but better!

A quick analysis of the three magazines above shows that each of the magazines have a real wedding in their top 10 pieces of content. Additionally, they also have tips for members of the Bridal party, like a Maid of Honour or Page boy – interesting.

Using Semrush to Find Content Ideas

Another great way to find content ideas for your blog is to use the Keywork research tool featured with Semrush. Semrush is a tool mainly used by SEO and SEM professionals but can offer some serious benefits when planning a content strategy.

Let’s start with the topic of Vintage Weddings. We know it has a popular audience from our research using Buzzsumo, but we also know that Vintage Weddings can cover a large number of topics. Popping in the phrase Vintage Weddings should bring up this…

Pretty intimidating, aye? For the non SEO or SEM professional this may appear to be a pretty complicated report, but for our blogging use we only need the two results under ‘Phrase Match Report’ and ‘Related Keywords Report’.

As you can see above, Vintage Weddings is a hot topic in the UK right now and it seems every Bride wants a Vintage Wedding. Keywords such as ‘Vintage Wedding Dresses’, ‘Vintage Wedding Ideas’ and ‘Vintage Wedding Cakes’ receive thousands of searches per month. From analysing the keywords that surround the term ‘Vintage Weddings’ we should be able to gauge the amount of interest in a particular topic and decide whether blogging on the subject would be worth our time.

Using the above we could look at writing blogs for:

Vintage Wedding Dress – 2400 Searches Per Month
Vintage Wedding Cakes – 1900 Searches Per Month
Vintage Wedding Shoes – 1600 Searches Per Month
Vintage Wedding Rings – 1300 Searches Per Month
Vintage Wedding Ideas  – 4400 Searches Per Month
Shabby Chic Weddings – 1000 Searches Per Month

Although these seem to be very popular topics with high search volumes per month, they also appear to be very competitive, since when we look at the average CPC (Cost Per Click) you can see how much marketers are willing to spend on particular each per click.

Vintage Wedding Dress Average CPC 0.59
Vintage Wedding Cakes Average CPC 0.82
Vintage Wedding Shoes Average CPC 0.57
Vintage Wedding Rings Average CPC 2.64
Vintage Wedding Ideas Average CPC 1.14
Shabby Chic Weddings Average CPC 0.55

Using the export function we can now try to find a number of related keywords (and content ideas) which are far more balanced in terms of searches per month and competitive density.

From a bigger report we can now look for niche keywords which are less competitive and still receive a fair number of searches per month. From the above, two particular keywords jump out.

Vintage Wedding Hairstyles – with 1000 searches per month Vintage
Wedding Theme Ideas – with 90 searches per month

Using the same Buzzsumo practice as detailed above, we can start to gather a list of blogs that have covered vintage wedding hairstyles or vintage wedding theme ideas. Your aim is then to create a better blog post that all of the top shared blog posts surrounding those subjects.

Other areas to find content ideas

If your inspiration from the above process seems to dry up, you can also turn to other processes which I have found to be fruitful in the past, for blog content creation. I would always start with the question… ‘If I were starting to plan a wedding today, what would I want to know?’.

Quora

Quora is the ultimate question and answer forum on the internet. You can also find some of the biggest authorities answering questions daily on nearly every subject imaginable. For inspiration when creating your blog topics it’s pretty much the place to be.

A quick search for ‘Wedding Ideas’ brings up the below.

Using the above Quora search as your source of inspiration you could write blogs such as…

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