How to Brainstorm Blog Topics to Grow Your Small Business

You understand that blogging is important for small business SEO, but how do you come up with enough blog ideas to stay consistent? What do you do when you've exhausted all the topics that come naturally? How do you make sure your blog is really serving and engaging your audience? 

Even marketing experts like Jenna Kutcher agree that blogging is essential for online business. It drives more traffic to your website, builds trust in your brand, and has a phenomenal ROI, considering it costs next to nothing to have one. So if the majority of small business owners agree that blogging is beneficial, why do only 48% of companies with content marketing strategies do it?

Blogging is a time investment, and requires intimate knowledge of your audience, your industry, and your brand voice. It can be intimidating, especially for solopreneurs trying to do it all themselves. It’s one of those ventures that’s easy to start, but difficult to maintain. So when your blog is running on fumes, here is how you can give is a jump start with fresh topics and ideas your audience will gravitate toward.

1. Know Your Problem

As a small business, you're solving a problem. Maybe you capture candid moments at your client's wedding so they can focus on each other while you save the memories, or your unique organic bedding is 100% hypoallergenic and safe for ultra sensitive skin, or your bath bombs are designed to help stressed out moms unwind after a long day of diapers and bottles.

No matter how insignificant the problem may be, your product or service solves a problem for your target market. In order to serve them well and convert passive viewers into paying customers or clients, you need to be able to articulate how your product or service solves their problem.

Offer Free Solutions for secondary problems

Your blog is the perfect place to do this by solving secondary problems that your audience is experiencing! Although your product or service is designed to address a specific problem, there are many other related issues that you can provide guidance for on your blog. Think of it as free advice that keeps them coming back for more, while establishing you as an authority in your industry.

For instance, if you're a wedding photographer, write a blog with your tips for staying relaxed and stress-free on the wedding day. Give your couples advice on what to do ahead of time, what tasks to delegate on the day of, and how to avoid crises that can ruin the joy of their special day. By writing a blog about this secondary problem, you're showing potential clients that you understand the difficulties of planning a wedding and desire to help them in every way possible. You're giving them the tools they need to solve other problems, while reminding them of the main problem that you solve: the photos!

Where to Find Secondary Problems

So how can you uncover these secondary problems to turn into blogs? Do your research! Look at others in your industry who aren't direct competitors and see what problems they're solving. If you sell sustainably made organic bedding, look at a brand that creates other sustainable products, or read blogs by popular eco-living content creators. Don't directly steal their ideas, but use their content to help focus your own and figure out how you can also provide insights into those secondary problems.

One of my favorite tools for brainstorming blog ideas is Answer the Public. With this tool, you just put in a keyword related to your industry, and it'll churn out a whole list of the most commonly searched questions on that topic. Plus, it puts them in a fun diagram!

2. Know Your Audience 

In order to understand your audience's key problems, you need to have intimate knowledge of who your audience is. You need to profile your dream client or customer. What are their interests? Their passions? Their likes and dislikes? How are you uniquely equipped to serve them?

If you’re a wedding photographer, your target audience is engaged couples. But you can niche down even further than that! If you specializes in expensive, high-end weddings, you’ll have a very different audience than a photographer who does more cozy, DIY weddings. Understanding which specific audience you're trying to reach will help you to curate your blogs more for that persona. Where the former may blog about the best venues for large, glamorous weddings in their region, the latter could share the top 5 wedding decor DIY trends for 2022.

Once you know who your ideal audience is, you need to figure out what questions they're asking. Look at what questions your current audience is asking in your emails, DMs, and social media comments. If one person is asking a question directly, odds are there are a hundred more behind them with the same exact question. 

You can also directly crowdsource ideas by asking your audience what questions they have in your Instagram Stories or a relevant Facebook group. If you're a photography coach, join photographer groups like the Rising Tide Society and see what kinds of problems photographers are asking about in there.

3. Make Time for Research

Don't just go through this process passively and expect to have plenty of blog ideas at your disposal. Researching for your blog should be done proactively, or else consistency will prove extremely difficult. Set aside time every couple of months to spend a good few hours researching and engaging with your ideal audience to create a long list of blog topics to refer to as you write content. Keep this running list always handy so you can add ideas to it any time you get inspired. No idea is a bad idea at this point, just write it down!

4. Bring in an Expert 

You don't have to do this alone. Your focus should be on the product or service you provide, and spending time on a blog in addition to that can be overwhelming - no wonder it's ended up on the backburner for so long!

A blog is essential for your business, but it's not essential for you to be the one writing and managing it. As a content writer, my job is to support you in curating topics and keeping that blog consistent and valuable to your audience while maintaining your unique brand voice. If writing isn’t your thing, then let it be my thing!

If you do want to do it yourself, but need help getting started, I can help with that too!

I can help you find the right topics to reach your people and inspire them to convert into loyal clients and customers!

Through my Blog Your Biz coaching container, we’ll take your blog from nonexistent to consistent in just three months.

By the end of it, you'll wonder why you ever had trouble writing in the first place!

I’m offering a 20% discount for the first three people to sign up, so don’t wait to contact me and learn more about this special offer!