Our Favorite Tips for Selecting Engaging Blog Topics
With 2024 right around the corner, now is a great time to evaluate your blog’s content and consider topics for the upcoming year. Picking topics for your blog that engage your readers, offer valuable information, and are relevant to your industry can feel overwhelming.
What if you choose the wrong topic and create content that doesn’t connect with your audience? Your time is limited, and your content must showcase your expertise while driving traffic to your site. Fortunately, there are easy ways to ensure you’re getting it right when choosing topics for your blog. Learn the differences between evergreen and topical content and find our top tips for selecting winning topics.
Pick Evergreen Topics to Establish Your Credibility
Evergreen content continues to stay relevant over time and gets its name from the trees which keep their leaves year-round. Unlike more topical content that may quickly boost your readership levels before falling sharply as the information goes out of date, your evergreen content will continue to attract readers to your site over months and years.
Your evergreen topics must offer in-depth and useful knowledge to establish credibility in your field. Evergreen topics let you position your company as an industry leader and benefit you by guiding more readers through your sales funnel. Optimizing your evergreen topics for search engines is also important, as this will improve your search ranking, driving more traffic to your blog over time.
While picking specific topics for your evergreen content depends on your industry and the needs, desires, and pain points of your ideal customers, both B2B and B2C blogs can start with one of these evergreen formulas:
How-To Posts, instructions, or tutorials
Ultimate guides
Reviews of a product or service
Explanations of common industry concepts or terms
Interviews with experts in your field
Provide industry tips
Listicles– listing tools, tips, or other relevant items
Answering FAQs (frequently asked questions)
Think of your evergreen content as your blog's foundation, giving you credibility in your field. There are topics for your industry or target audience that will stand the test of time and be relevant now, in five months, and two years. It's important to create evergreen content that can attract and retain readers now and in the future.
A business-to-business (B2B) company that provides outsourced bookkeeping services might consider producing a listicle of items for clients to keep for tax or ledger purposes as an evergreen topic. Whereas a business-to-consumer (B2C) brand may prefer a blog post that answers customers' most frequent questions about a product or service.
Use Topical Content to Strengthen Your Thought Leadership
Your blog can also include posts that cover of-the-moment topics and relevant current events that matter to your brand, customers, or industry. These timely blog posts usually have short-lived attention but can attract significantly more searches and boost your traffic while they're sought-after. They also help you demonstrate your knowledge in a topic or given field.
Examples of topical content include:
Pop culture and trending events
Seasonal or holiday-themed posts
Quarterly or annual reports
Latest models of tech or digital products
Newsworthy events
Many brands use topical content to share company or industry news, wrap-up coverage of events like conferences, and the industry impact of current events. For example, a B2C brand whose audience is at-home bakers may want to write a blog post about how inflation is currently affecting the price of common baking ingredients and offer insights on how to save. While this topic is timely in the current climate, its popularity will fade as the economy changes in the future.
A B2B brand can benefit from a topical blog post by summarizing an industry event they spoke at, showing their authority and expertise in the field. Producing content about the latest developments in your field is another way to build your thought leadership through your blog.
What Else to Consider When Selecting Topics
Deciding on a blog topic can feel overwhelming, even after choosing between evergreen and topical content. The following information will guide you to ideas suitable for your brand, provide value to your readers, and show off your expertise. You can use this method to help brainstorm new topics and confirm your ideas are on the right track. Consider the following:
Understand Your Target Audience
If your topic isn't engaging or offering value to your readers, it's bound to fail. Knowing your target audience's desires, pain points, and challenges is the first step to picking topics that engage readers and perform well.
Review Your Current Content
Take a look at the content you already have on your blog. Are there specific topics that have generated more interest than others? What are your most popular posts, and what do they have in common? Are there topics that didn't get traction? Reviewing what's already working well can help you decide what direction to take next.
Consider Your Buyer's Journey
What will your readers look for as they consume your content and step closer to becoming paying customers or clients? Do you have posts that answer common questions your audience will have to help them get sales-ready? Find out if you are missing any vital areas, and consider expanding on the content you already have.
Check Out Your Competition
Take a peak at blogs from your direct competitors to see what topics they cover. Use this as inspiration for topic ideas but make new posts your own by offering additional information and insights. Or approach the topic from a different angle that would be more helpful or relevant to your audience.
Use Online Tools to Validate Topics
Once you've come up with your idea, you can confirm its relevance by performing keyword research or using tools like BuzzSumo. This website lets you search for popular topics and keywords in your field and shares metrics so you can see how well it performed. It's a great way to validate your own topics or get ideas for new ones.
Need help picking out blog topics for your B2B or B2C site? Our team at Comma Copywriters understands your content needs and can help produce valuable evergreen and topical content for your brand. Schedule your quick, free consultation with us to learn more.