15 Blog Post Ideas to Get The Creative Juices Flowing
You offer a great service, your clients love you and you’re an expert at what you do. But you find it difficult to create interesting, regular content that drives traffic to your website and ultimately makes sales for your business.
The best advice I can give is, keep it simple!
I get it, I mean who goes into business to have to wrack one's brains every week about articles, videos, posts, newsletters and the dreaded Insta reels?
My philosophy has always been to keep it simple and use your blog (or vlog, if you prefer to create video content on YouTube) as the primary place to create content on an ongoing basis. There are a number of reasons for this:
small business owners who are asking Google questions about the very things you can help them with, are more likely to be directed to your site if you answer those questions on your blog
not only will they find the answers to their questions, they will find a whole library of other useful, actionable advice on your blog, reinforcing your credibility
You can create a template for your blog layout that can be used and reused, saving you time
You can create a template for your blog thumbnail too, using something like Canva. You just update the photo and text each time.
Once you have written a blog, you then have content to reuse elsewhere, such as on social media (avoiding the need to reinvent the wheel at every touchpoint)
You can get feedback directly from readers on your blog
You own your blog, whereas social media is rented digital real estate. If LinkedIn crashes, you still have your website - the home of your content
You can schedule blog posts to go out on specific days, so if you dedicate a block of time to writing, you can drip-feed the articles automatically
You might be thinking, "okay okay I get it, blogging has benefits, but what the heck do I write?"
I hear you!
Here's my advice for deciding what to write about on your blog:
Google likes to provide users with the best answers to their questions. My last Google search was "Can I cook sweet potatoes in the oven?" 🙈 (I know, I should’ve known the answer to that!) The search before that was "Where can I find a reusable gold shopper-style bag?" Both of these were questions and that's the first thing you should consider for your blogs....what questions do your customers ask when they email you, come into your shop or book a discovery call? Turn these questions into blog posts. That's the easiest way to start.
If you're not sure of what sorts of questions your customers are asking, you can also go straight to Google and put a word associated with your product or service into the search bar and Google will give you a drop-down list with the most popular searches around that word or term or a section with ‘People also ask’, like this:
3. Ideally as part of your overall marketing strategy you would carve out what we call pillar topics which are the main topics you want to be known for in your industry.
For example, if you are a health coach, your pillar topics could be Nutrition, Mindfulness, Sleep and Stress Management and Movement. Then, within each of these pillars there's a whole host of subtopics related to them...these are your content clusters, the topics to cover in your blogs in the form of questions, comparisons, guides and top tips.
4. Another resource is www.Answerthepublic.com which gives you stats and suggestions for the most popular Google searches on a specific topic.
If you are still stuck for what to write about, here are some ideas to get the creative juices flowing:
5. Shine a light on one of your best clients. If you’re lucky enough to have some loyal customers or passionate fans, why not highlight them and promote their work; this strengthens your connection with them and inspires others to engage with you too.
6. write a summary of an outstanding event you hosted or attended. If you’ve been to some great events or meet-ups around your sector of activity, share the highlights with your readers. These blog post ideas can be executed as simply as sharing a short summary with a few actionable takeaways—that’s about all you need to help your audience get value from your experience at the event.
7. write a 'how-to' post or a comparison post.
8. give people a peek into your schedule - what does your average day look like? Your daily routine may not seem interesting to you, but exposing a little bit of your personal life is an authentic blog post idea that’ll make your readers feel closer to you, gather helpful insights about how they could improve their own routines, and will also make them more invested in your business in general.
9 .how did you get started in your business or career? Storytelling is such a powerful tool for creating a connection with your audience. Tell the story of how you got started, the journey to growing your business and what it took to get your business off the ground.
10. share your goals for 2024 and how you plan to achieve them. I am always curious about other business owner's goals. There's always a few golden nuggets in there that I can apply to my own business and chances are they will be helpful to your clients too.
11. talk about the charities you support and why.
12. help your readers out by putting together a top ten list of the most influential people in your space as a series of blog post ideas that they should be paying attention to.
13. what was the best piece of advice you ever received and how did it help you grow your business?
14. interview an influencer in your niche and invite them to share their thoughts and experiences with your audience. Not only will you have a great piece of content on your hands, you’ll have a new addition to your professional network.
15. ask someone you know who specialises in an area related to yours to write a guest blog post on your site and you can do the same on theirs (with both of you sharing on social media, for twice the impact!).
Remember, January and February is a good time of the year to update existing blogs, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. Don’t forget that if you should update your blog’s url as part of an update, you need to map the old url to the new in the URL Mapping section of the backend of your Squarespace website, like this:
One of my most popular blogs from last year (I am ranking 4 on Google for this) is How Much Does a Website Cost? A 2024 Pricing Guide. Up until last week it was called a 2023 Pricing Guide, but I have updated it so Google knows it's up to date.
I know it's not easy to dedicate time to your blog but it is such a great way to remind the search engines that your website is alive and kicking and, more importantly, to illustrate that your products and services are useful and relevant to your ideal clients who are searching the internet.
Of course, the real hallmark of successful content isn’t just ranking well in organic search results, or getting thousands of readers. It’s whether or not your readers actually take action and create measurable change after consuming your content. So think about the calls to action you want to add on your blog - perhaps a lead magnet, links to other relevant blogs or a button linked to your contact page.
And finally...
Did you know that you can automatically notify Google Search Console about a new (or an old) blog post from directly within Squarespace?
If you go to your blog post settings and click on the three little dots to the right of the post on your blog page in editing mode, from there you can click on Share, then toggle on where it says Push to Google Search Console, like this:
You can did this for previously posted blogs too, which I recommend for your SEO.
Sadly Kajabi has no such functionality, but you can of course set page titles and page descriptions for each of your pages on Kajabi, which is important for SEO. You can also regularly submit a sitemap to Google Search Console directly, if you have fresh content on your website (no matter what platform it is on).
