The first step to attracting qualified visitors to your website is to create a blog. However, after that you need to keeping your blog updated publish regularly, and that’s always more difficult! Why is it important to update your blog frequently?
How do you find high-value content ideas to maintain a good publishing pace? Here are some explanations and 15 tips to keep your blog alive.
Why update your blog regularly?
As you know, to increase traffic to your website you must implement an effective content strategy. Yet, the publication frequency is part of it, and this for several reasons:
- Since Google favors fresh content, its crawler Googlebot will then crawl your site more often. This is excellent for your indexing and therefore your organic search ranking.
- You will rank for a larger number of long-tail keywords, which will allow you to reach your target audience more easily.
- The more blog posts you publish, the more conversions you generate on your site and the more likely you are to turn prospects into customers.
- Publishing regularly allows you to demonstrate your expertise and therefore boost your reputation with your audience.
- An active blog generates 97% more backlinks.
- Companies that publish 16 articles per month generate 3.5 times more leads than those that publish fewer than 4 articles per month.
However, to achieve such a result, your editorial strategy must be relevant, with a coherent editorial calendar, high-quality SEO-optimized content and a variety of content formats.
Yes, maintaining a blog requires a significant investment, and if you operate in a highly competitive sector, it can be very substantial. Here are some figures:
- Blog posts of 2,000 to 3,000 words are favored by users and search engines.
- Bloggers or writers take about 4 hours to write a quality blog post.
- Potential customers read 3 to 5 blog posts before deciding to buy.
But rest assured, if you’re stuck for ideas to feed your professional blog, here are 15 tips to succeed with your content marketing strategy!
Update your blog with new content
There are many ways to overcome writer’s block and find enough content ideas to keep your blog going throughout the year.
1. Get inspiration from your competitors' blogs
A quick look at your competitors’ blogs will not only give you ideas to create content, but also show which topics rank best! Be careful, though: the goal is to differentiate yourself from the competition. Don’t plagiarize their good ideas (which Google heavily penalizes), but do better and bring your own expertise to the topic.
2. Set up effective monitoring
Nearly 7 million blog posts and billions of social media posts are published worldwide every day. It would be a shame to miss out on this impressive source of ideas. By setting up relevant and effective monitoring, you’ll save valuable time and receive new ideas directly in your RSS feed reader.
3. Get ideas to feed your blog from your readers
Who better than your target customers to know what information they want to find on your blog? Watch your community’s posts, read your audience’s interactions, create polls on social networks, etc. By listening to your audience, you’ll be able to gather many content ideas while perfectly answering their search intent!
4. Diversify content types
Content creation is not limited to editorial content. In fact, the more variety you offer on your blog, the more attractive it will become. Alternate between long and short pieces, interviews and case studies, tutorials and comparison tests… By widening the range of possibilities, you'll realize that the same topic can be adapted endlessly (or nearly so).
5. Use Google Search
Google is still the best place to get ideas handed to you on a silver platter. Between its Keyword Planner, the search suggestion tool, the “People also ask” section and related searches, you'll have a whole list of topics to cover for your content creation.
Pro tip: the site Answer The Public which is based on Google search displays all that information instantly.
6. Translate an article published in a foreign language
Nothing stops you from taking a blog post written in a foreign language and translating it. However, be careful: respect the author's words and be sure to credit them. Don’t stop at a simple translation; add value to the article by bringing your expertise and point of view. The goal is to turn it into unique, relevant content for your readers.
7. Adjust your editorial calendar to your marketing goals
If you start writing content without a clear purpose, you'll scatter your efforts! Start by setting SMART goals:
- Specific: Is the goal to generate more web traffic? To gain new customers? To improve your online presence?
- Measurable: that is, you can quantify it (by your revenue, the expected additional number of visits, etc.).
- Achievable: your goal must, of course, be realistic and you must have the time, skills and resources necessary to reach it.
- Relevant: is your project appropriate? For example, is it sensible to publish content every day when you are extremely busy on the side?
- Time-bound: set a deadline to determine whether you have adopted the right content strategy.
Then create a realistic editorial calendar. Once the schedule is in place, though, follow it rigorously!
Update your blog with older content
You’re not the only one who sometimes runs out of article ideas—marketers do too—and to solve this problem they often make something new out of something old…
8. Make updates
A change in legislation, a breaking news item on a topic you've already covered, advice to add to a cornerstone article or, conversely, outdated elements to remove… Updating old content is a well-known blogging technique. Some people merely change an article’s publication date—don’t take the easy route; actually modify your article. First, your loyal readers will notice, and second, take the opportunity to improve your SEO in the process!
9. Rewrite old articles
Along the same lines, rewriting is a good way to publish fresh content. This mostly involves revisiting your article's theme and adapting it. For example, if you wrote “10 ways to make money with a blog,” rephrase it as “How to run a profitable blog?” Change some wording, revise your outline, and you’re done!
10. Take a different angle
This technique is called negative writing. It involves taking a completely different angle on an already published article. For example, if you wrote “5 best practices in inbound marketing,” write a second article called “5 mistakes to avoid in inbound marketing.” You switch from positive to negative and end up with two totally different articles!
11. Repurpose old articles
With this approach, you don’t change the content or the angle, you simply change the format. Did you write a long tutorial? Condense it into an infographic.
Update your blog with content written by third parties
Why rack your brains to find a blog topic that will attract readers if you can have others write your next articles for you?
12. Automatically generate content
Task automation is also making its way into content writing with increasingly powerful content generators. ContentBot, for example, is an AI already widely used by bloggers and copywriters. The tool can not only produce quality blog content but also provide original and relevant ideas. Nevertheless, even if the tool can help occasionally, always remember that a machine will never have the sensitivity and talent of a human writer.
13. Open the blog to guest posts
By accepting guest post publications, you save yourself the task of writing articles and very likely gain backlinks at the same time. If you allow the guest author to link to their site, and they play along, they will likely link back to yours. However, be careful: choose your future author well — they should be in the same industry as you and master their subject.
14. Create a collaborative blog
Creating a collaborative company blog will help you make up for missing content and provide multiple perspectives, allowing you to reach a wider audience. So don’t hesitate to ask your employees or collaborators to blog or at least suggest ideas!
15. Hire professional writers
Last tip on the list: create a web blog and call on professional web writersThese web writing experts are used to covering many topics and will certainly help you fill your editorial calendar.
Our tip for regularly updating your blog
You now have plenty of ways to find the best ideas to feed your blog. Remember to take notes as soon as an article idea comes to mind.
However, for a high-performing digital content strategy, it’s preferable to delegate content production to an SEO expert. With our content strategy packsyou will benefit from tailored support, including a complete SEO audit, topic research aligned with users’ queries, and high-quality content. Keep that in mind!
