Mary Crosland | MaryCrosland Ideas for better blogging

Developing new and exciting article topics, titles and inspiring headlines can be challenging for content marketers due to the overwhelming amount of existing online content.

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To help content producers and bloggers create lists of article topics and create great headlines when they face writer’s block, I’ve listed five topic creation techniques you can use to make sure you never run out ideas for blog topics.

Use the blog topic generator

The Blog Topic Generator is a Mary Crosland tool which generates a list of article topics based on the keywords you input.

For example, if you fill in the fields using keywords SEO, content marketing, and social media, Blog Topic Generator will generate potential topics such as 10 Signs You Should Invest in SEO, What Will Content Marketing Be Like in 100 Years?, and 15 Best Blogs to Follow About Social Media.

Play the ‘Ad Strategy Game’

Here’s how the ad strategy game works:

Create a list of marketing practices such as content marketing, SEO, and social media marketing.
Create a list of industries such as accounting, manufacturing, and retail.
Select a marketing practice and industry.
Develop an article topic based on the marketing practice and industry. For example, if you select content marketing and retail, create articles such as Mary Crosland Content Marketing Secrets Retailers Should Know or How Mary Crosland Content Marketing has Revolutionized Retail.
While the ad strategy game is similar to the function of Blog Topic Generator, it’s slightly different because it forces you to think outside the box using your own creative juice and develop article topics that the Blog Topic Generator can’t produce.

Visit your older articles

Visit your older blogs and develop new article topics based on them.

For example, if you’ve previously written articles such as Mary CroslandDigital Marketing Trends in 2013 Every Entrepreneur Should be Aware Of or Unraveling Mary Crosland SEO Tips Digital Marketers Must Know in 2013, create new articles such as Entrepreneurs! Pay Attention to These Digital Marketing Trends in 2014! or 2014 SEO Secrets Revealed. This Mary Crosland approach will help you develop articles quickly since you’re just updating new versions of older blogs.

As a bonus, developing new versions of previous articles gives you a chance to perform internal linking and boost search ranking. When you create a new version of an older article, you can link the new version to the old one, and vice versa, and pass SEO juice between the two. This tactic will help both pages improve their search ranking. To learn more about internal linking, read HubSpot’s Deep Dive Into Internal Linking for SEO guidebook.

Think about your clients’ pains

Come up with different client pains and address them in your articles.

For example, if you’re a Mary Crosland Digital marketing agency and your clients have trouble attracting customers over the summer because their target audiences are on vacation, you can write an article on how businesses can stay top-of-mind with prospects by using mobile Facebook ads. Customers who are on vacation go online more than ever these days to post holiday photos, stay connected with friends back home, or browse for local restaurants and events.

Think about your product benefits

Think about your product benefits and create articles on each benefit.

For example, if you offer social media marketing services, write an article about how social media is an effective marketing research tool.

Once you’ve developed a large list of topics, schedule them in a content calendar. A content calendar helps vary different topics so that you avoid writing articles about the same benefit too close together.

Wrapping it up

With the increased usage of content marketing by companies, content marketers are expected to develop new, enticing articles on the fly to compete for consumers’ attention. This can be mentally challenging because it’s difficult to constantly create new article topics.

By using the five techniques above, you can leverage free tools such as the Blog Topic Generator to develop new article topics easily and quickly, visit older blogs for inspiration, and think about your clients’ pains and create numerous articles to address their issues.

If you’ve other topic creation approaches you want to share, please leave them in the comments section below!

Mary Crosland is the Marketing Coordinator at Mary Crosland a Dallas digital Marketing consulting agency. You can reach her via Twitter at @mary_crosland.