How To Decide What to Write on a Blog to Grow an Audience of Raving Fans!

byTDenise

5.7K followers

Updated 6 years ago

In my previous post on Copywriting Tips, I talked about the time many of us (online entrepreneurs) experience where we're sitting in front of the computer screen. Some of us sit staring at the blank screen for longer than others. Even if you know copywriting formulas, when you don't have a strategy for creating ongoing content, you tend to have quite a few of these blank screen, dumbfounded moments.

They can be stressful. When the ideas aren't just flowing, it can become a personal moment. You might start introspecting and wondering, "Why can't I come up with anything?", and if you allow the negative thoughts to continue to amp up, they can begin to sound more like:

"Is something wrong with me?"

"Am I cut out for this?"

"Maybe I'm not a good writer?"

or even worse, "Maybe I should just quit"

These dumbfounded moments can be painstaking especially if you don't have time to just sit around and waste. In this article, I'll be sharing with you leading strategies for how to decide what to write on a blog.

Let's get started...

My Story

I started blogging in 2015. At the time, I didn't have any formal training and I relied heavily on personal inspiration for my ideas.

The thing about personal inspiration is...

You can have days where you have several ideas you think are "great", and you can have days where you don't have any inspiration at all. As a result of my reliance on personal inspiration, I tended to be inconsistent and I didn't really have a "strategy" for how my content would correlate to achieve any formal goal.

I wanted to earn an income, but I didn't have a calculated way of deciding how my content would pull that off.

Personal Inspiration vs. Market Demand

While channeling personal inspiration into our work can be extremely fulfilling, it can also leave empty pockets (like it did mine). It took me years to earn online thru blogging.

While blog titles might sound catchy, they may not generate as much buzz at we've envisioned in our minds. Even when we see other businesses that seemingly pull off something close to what you been "inspired" to write, there are other unseen factors besides title and content that helps content to spread.

As you know, in this business, the money is in the traffic and conversions, so most people are looking to create viral content that converts into some sort of sales or brand awareness KPIs. If we solely follow inspiration, it's a "hit or miss" way to obtain the goal of brand awareness and sales, and in all reality, it may never pick up. Instead, if you cater to market demand, you're creating content that people are already searching for.

Factors That Influence Content Virality

In an article I wrote called,"What is Viral Content?", I discuss stats, factors, and ingredients for viral content. Factors like:

• Search engine optimization
  
• Paid Advertising Budget
  
• Platform size and reach
  
• Ongoing publishing schedule
  
• Quantity of traffic sources
  
• Quality of traffic
  
• Quantity of Collaborators
  
• and Brand Reputation..

Can have a HUGE influence on content virality. There are anomalies where a person will post a video or blog without a monopoly of the virality factors, and their content goes viral, but, for the most part, viral content has alot of intention. For more on viral content, you can check out my article HERE.

The Influence of Business Model

When you're deciding what to write on a blog, business model should also be taken into account. Some people are local business owners, some are direct sales people, some freelancers, and some startup from scratch--the business model and growth stage of the business matters.

For example, if you're a startup entrepreneur whose freelancing and blogging, you might want to use your content to build a portfolio or you might want to use it to build another customer acquisition channel. You'd want to decide whether you're clients are ultimately going to be readers or people who want to buy your services--either can work, but pursuing both, will be a delicate balancing act.

Content as an Employee?

Let's go on a little mental adventure for a second...

Let's imagine we're hiring the content as an employee.

We have to decide where we're putting this employee. Will we be putting them in Human Resources? Finance? Sales? Marketing? Customer Support? Leadership? Or, where?

For example, a content strategy that is created for human resources might be focused on training people in-house. It could second as a resource for others, but it's primary job would be to train in-house people.

On the other hand, a content strategy focused on customer support could give tutorials, answer commonly asked questions, or show customers common product or service uses.

If the content is your first "employee", most focus the content on sales, but to each is their own. While there's alot of training emphasis on blogging for customer acquisition, there are businesses that get high returns on investment from using content for other reasons. Unfortunately, if you don't focus, then you're content (or hiree) won't perform as it should.

Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention, or Both?

In keeping with the analogy of our content as an employee, you'd be deciding whether the content performs in your customer acquisition processes or retention processes, or both. Since content isn't limited as humans are, you could diversify it's uses as you're building along.

Customer acquisition content:

• Helps overcome objections
  
• Addresses competitive advantages
  
• Demonstrates the strengths of the product, services, or company
  

Whereas customer retention content:

• Answers user questions or concerns
  
• Provides updates and news
  
• Demonstrates added uses of the product, services, or company
  
• and adds further value to keep the customer satisfied
  

Think about your favorite restaurant for a second. What did they do to get you to stop by? Was it the logo? Was it pictures of the food? Did they provide such good quality it sent your friends telling you about them? What was it?

You'll want to add the elements into your business and if you're using content for acquisition, think about how you can translate your experience being an acquired raving customer into your content strategy.

In contrast, what do they do to keep you as a customer? Do they answer your questions about menu items? Are the pictures appealing? What are their competitive advantages and how'd you find out about them? What do they say that keeps you coming back?

Customer acquisition and customer retention are common uses for blog content. In the beginning, when you don't have customers, you could focus your content on sales and overcoming objections until you gain traction, then you can intermingle sales with customer support or so on.

Customer Acquisition Strategies

When you're considering what to write on a blog and deciding where to place your hiree (your content), you also want to consider whether the content is going to be a standalone system for acquiring and selling to an end user or will it be used for a more compartmentalized role.

While there's alot of emphasis on blogging for customer acquisition, it definitely doesn't work for everyone. Each customer acquistion strategy takes time, so you'll have to decide which is most interesting for you, and which is the best return for the time you spend.

Customer Acquisition Strategies Other than Blogging

Depending on your business model, you may prefer monopolizing your marketing efforts by an alternative customer acquisition strategy and using blog content to fill a smaller role.

For example, I've seen local businesses who use content more for customer support and focus live sales efforts on answering objections and building credibility. Other content acquisition strategies include:

• Live networking
  
• Vendor events
  
• House Parties
  
• Paid Advertising
  
• Mastermind Marketing
  
• Webinar Marketing
  
• Cold Email
  
• Cold Call
  
• Social Media Marketing
  
• Forum Marketing
  
• Public Relations
  
• Video Marketing
  
• Direct Mail
  

Pricing Strategy and Content Strategy: How Do They Influence Each Other?

Your pricing strategy can also influence what you write on a blog. Are you selling high ticket items like consulting or events, or are you selling competitively priced products like body care or household goods?

(Image Source: Tony Robbins)

Pricing strategy also influences your decision on how to decide what to write on a blog. When you see businesses that thrive off of high ticket sales like Tony Robbins, Dan Lok, or big reputable companies like Rolex, you'll see they use blog content a little different than companies who use competitive pricing like Walmart, Target, or McDonald's.

High ticket sales requires more trust, a large results-driven portfolio, and a reputation with shows of social proof. As a result a high ticket content strategy might be monopolized to focused on building credibility sufficient to sell one offer.

For example, when you take a look at Tony Robbins content strategy, his blog content is monopolized by content about the breakthrough his clients are having thru his events, news, updates, specifics about the brand, interviews, and influencer marketing.

(Source: Walmart)

Walmart, on the other hand, wouldn't be nearly as focused on one product or service. Instead, their content focuses on building their brand reputation as the versatile place to buy more and save more. In their content you can find list posts like:

• 6 Ways to Style School Uniforms
  
• Crafting Tips
  
• or, Recipes for Entertaining
  

If you're unclear about what pricing strategy is used on the products/services you're promoting, take a look at my article on Pricing Strategies. I'll walk you thru the various pricing strategies and how to identify them. Whether you're promoting your own product or service, or someone else's, it's important to know which pricing strategy is being used so you can respond appropriately to your customers.

Steps to Take When You're Deciding What To Write on a Blog

Now, when you're sitting down at your computer deciding what to write on your blog, you want to have all of the preliminaries we've discussed out of the way. This will help you to be clear about why you're blogging in the first place. When you have clarity about your mission, it makes it easier to create the ideas With that in mind, when you're preparing to write a blog, here's some steps you should take:

1. Identify your target audience: your potential customers, your retained customers, employees, shareholders, or who?

2. Define the purpose of your content. If you're content was an employee, what's the hired position?

3. Research to find out what is your audience struggling with, and what are their major concerns.

3. Write notes about how your product or concern solves their problem.

4. Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats by doing a SWOT analysis. Perform a SWOT analysis on competitors too and decide how you're company sticks out,

5. Decide what demonstrations or tutorials could be most helpful for your target audience.

6. Do keyword research to pick low hanging fruit keywords you can leverage in the search engines.

7. Use Copywriting Tips to shape the content to flow and convert.

8. Study Top Marketing Influencers and their clients to see how they've used content to drive actions. Get inspiration from them!

Final Words On How To Decide What To Write on a Blog

The goal with this post was to show you how to decide what to write on a blog. I know this is a commonly discussed topic, but I wanted to show you some different angles that influence the decision. Hopefully, the added input I've disclosed here helps you to think more longsighted on a strategic level about your content rather than thinking about the impact only on a tactical level.

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Now, It's Your Turn...

How do you decide what to write on a blog? What's your method? What methods have you seen others use?