📊 Fact: Businesses that blog regularly get 3.5x more traffic and 4.5x more leads than businesses that don’t.
👆🏾 Fair point: If you blog regularly, that is.
🧚🏽♂️ Fiction: Blogging regularly is easy.
The benefits of blogging often take months to see, and while the benefits compound themselves, this is dependent on whether you can keep feeding the strategy. And this is not easy. So if your blog is a garden and you’re in a drought, don’t worry. You’re (a) not alone and (b) about to be dancing in the rain. Read on for 118 blog post ideas that’ll keep your strategy strong and your job fun—plus examples and Google Doc templates!
Your goal with these posts is to set yourself apart from other businesses in your niche and build authority.
X Things [Hobby] Can Teach You About [Topic]: What are you passionate about outside of your business? Can you find a way to connect it with a concept relevant to your readers? Thought leadership doesn’t always mean coming up with new concepts or, well, thoughts. It can also mean coming up with new ways to package old concepts.
Experts Weigh In: Is there a “controversial” topic in your niche? Not one that is emotionally charged, but something that can spark a mix of responses. Ask a handful of experts the same question (or set of questions) to get a well-rounded perspective. For an example, check out our Ultimate Guide to PPC Metrics: 17 Experts on the Top 3 Must-Check PPC Metrics
X Best Practices I Don’t Follow: What are some standards that you find work against your favor, are antiquated, or simply don’t work for your scenario? Share them and why. Note: To avoid leading anyone astray, be specific about why and make sure to illustrate scenarios when those best practices are, indeed, best.
A “Really,” “Truly,” or “Actually” List: Every niche has those keywords that, when searched on Google, bring up pages and pages of results that all basically say the same thing. In our niche, for example, it’s Instagram captions. Drives me bonkers. But you can be the one result that doesn’t just copy and paste what’s already there, and actually take the time to come up with your own authentic list (while still meeting the intent of the keyword, of course). Then make it clear in your SEO title. In fact, I do just that in my 131 [NOT Overused!] New Year’s Instagram Captions.
X Things I Wish I Knew / Mistakes I Made: Talking about your shortcomings can be just as effective as your successes. Plus, it makes you more human. Reflect on mistakes you’ve made in your journey doing your line of work, or things you wish you knew sooner. Your readers will appreciate the transparency—not to mention being able to avoid making the same mistakes.
Share Your Opinion on Something: Express your mind on a topic in your industry. Just remember that it’s best to also present the opposing opinion or other perspectives involved. A good example is our post on Performance Max: Pros, Cons & Polarized Perspectives.
By its very nature, thought leadership content isn’t likely to drive a lot of organic traffic. After all, you’re introducing new thoughts and concepts that your readers don’t know to search. But you can garner traffic to these posts through social shares, email marketing, and internal linking. And if it’s authentic enough, you’ll be sure to get backlinks.
More thought leadership blog post ideas
What Does [Topic A] Have to Do With [Seemingly Unrelated Topic B]?
A [Role]’s Perspective on [Something Outside of That Role]
The Best Piece of [Topic] Advice I’ve Ever Received
Share the story behind your business (makes for good about us page copy too)
Share your top takeaways from a recent presentation
Review a book in your niche—either a new one or a classic.
Interview an influencer or expert in the field
Strategy & tip blog post ideas
This should be the meat and potatoes of your content strategy. Some businesses hesitate to share how to do something that they do for their clients. But you don’t have to share your top-secret tactics. Plus, by showing them how to do something, you demonstrate that you a) know what you’re talking about and b) genuinely want to help them. If your blog doesn’t provide it, they’ll find it elsewhere, and if they can do it themselves, they’re not a good fit for your business anyway. Your target is the people who don’t have the skills, or the bandwidth/desire/time to learn the skills to do what you do.
How to Do X in X Time: Humans love to save time. They also love predictability. Telling them how to do something within a finite period (in a week, in an hour, in five minutes)—particularly a faster time period than they’re used to is guaranteed to drive clicks.
How We [Achieved X]: As long as it doesn’t reveal your secret sauce, share how you reached a particular goal (one that your customers also want to reach)—strategies used, mistakes made, challenges faced—to help others do the same.
Topic: The X-Step Recipe to Success: Turn a particular process into a food analogy and walk your readers through how to do it, recipe-style Share ingredients (tools/skills/mindset(s) needed), steps, images, and plenty of food puns. Here’s a tasty example: How to Run Google Ads: The Step-by-Step Recipe to Success.
The Quickstart Guide to X: just like a piece of equipment often comes with detailed instructions and a shorter quickstart guide, distill one of your more detailed walk-throughs or whitepapers into a post that just covers the basics. Also known as a cheatsheet or pocket guide.
Just make sure that if you’re targeting a keyword with any of these ideas, that the content still matches the intent of that keyword. Otherwise, it’s not likely to rank. (Unfortunately, sometimes SEO and creativity don’t get along).
More strategy blog post ideas
X Tips We Swear By
The Clueless [Persona]’s Guide/Manual to X
X Different Ways to Do X
X Must-Dos for [Persona]s Looking to [Achieve Something]
Repurposing content is just an all-around great situation. Not only are you maximizing the mileage you get out of your efforts, but it’s also a great way to keep your content fresh (there are always little updates that come with it) and save yourself some time.
Compile your top tips. Comb through your posts on a particular topic and extract the best tip from each one—ideally, very specific and niche tips that your audience might not necessarily know to search for. Combine these into a post and you’ve got yourself a hack list.
Round up your top strategies. This is similar to the above, but instead of extracting specific tips, gather up a handful of posts that each cover a particular strategy in depth. Create a post covering each strategy briefly, then link to the more detailed coverage when you talk about each one.
Combine and redirect. Got a lot of short posts all covering the same keyword cluster? They could be competing with one another on the SERP. Consider combining them into one comprehensive post and redirecting them accordingly. You might use the one URL that has the most traffic and/or backlinks. Or if none of them have stellar performance, just publish as new and redirect all of them to the new link.
Create a post out of a comment thread. Got any social media posts that sparked a long Q&A thread or interesting discussion? Turn it into a post!
Don’t forget that you can also repurpose your blog posts into other types of content, like videos, webinars, podcasts, infographics, social posts, ebooks, and more.
More repurposing blog post ideas
Turn a mega list of stats into a shorter post on data-backed reasons to do X.
Distill a whitepaper down into a blog post or series of shorter blog posts
Transcribe a podcast or video into a blog post
Turn a webinar into a Q&A blog post
Share a “best of” roundup (top posts of the month, quarter, year)
Company culture blog post ideas
This category can and will overlap with thought leadership. Use these posts to inform, inspire, entertain, and express. Oh, and promote them on LinkedIn especially.
Employee roundup: If you have a large team, create a quick and fun survey or poll and send it out. It could be on how they deal with stress, it could be themed around your core values, or a current event (that isn’t too controversial). Do a fun write-up on the results, with visuals and even quoting any open-ended responses (get their permission first, of course).
Core values series: Dedicate one post a month to your core values. Do a deep dive on a particular one, with examples, famous quotes, employee quotes, maybe even customer quotes, and internal photos. Or even highlight a different business each month—either one that shares your core values, or if you’re B2B, a client business.
Job opening roundup: Rather than just posting job openings on your careers page, on social, and on job listing sites, create a fun blog post on it. You can include more colorful and creative definitions, fun images and examples, and even some exclusive information not found in the other listings. You may find that applications that come in through the post are a more qualified tier of folks. For example: Our Marketing Team is Growing (& How You Can Help!).
Don’t expect a lot of traffic with these posts, but that’s not the point. They’re there to humanize your business, give your readers something to emotionally connect with, and to spark employee engagement and pride.
More company culture blog post ideas
Employee spotlight
Customer spotlight
Subject matter expert interview/Q&A
Team member guest post
Share your goals for the quarter/year
Key moment of the week
Event recap
Product support blog post ideas
These blog posts are more on the promotional side, but even if they’re meant to support your product, you can make them brand agnostic so as not to narrow your reach or come off as too salesy. Let’s look at some examples.
X Signs It’s Time to [Buy a Product or Service]: Rather than telling your audience what they need or want, present the signs and symptoms. There’s no denying those! And if you incorporate ways your product or service alleviates those pain points, well then now you’ve planted a seed.
What to Look for in a [Your Service] Provider: This is a great trust builder. You’re guiding your reader in making an informed decision, regardless of whether they choose you or a competitor. Giving them that free will to choose someone else (this is the “But You Are Free” Effect) often sways them in the direction of choosing you. You can find an example with our 10 Questions to Ask When Choosing a PPC Agency.
Latest FAQs: Let’s say you don’t have the resources to have a community manager, knowledge base, or product forum, but you get a lot of questions about using your product. Create a series where each week (or month, or quarter) you answer the latest FAQs you’re getting.
Case study: This is a must-have piece of marketing collateral, and they make for great blog posts! You can publish them as blog posts, or take the page or PDF version and turn it into a blog post by giving it an even more storied feel. Our case study tips will help you with this.
If you’re not fully set up on social media and review sites, you can see what customers are asking about your product by looking at the queries that are coming through on your website search.
More product support blog post ideas
Demo or unique ways to use your product
Sneak peek
New product or new feature launch announcement
Data-driven blog post ideas
Data-driven blog posts are great for getting quality backlinks to your site, which help your SEO. Proprietary data is always best, but it’s also the hardest to come by, so you’ll see a mix of ideas here.
Industry benchmark data post: Do you have any data you can collect from your customer database that would be useful to share? For example, we publish advertising benchmarks reports which are always a hit. People like to see where they stand relative to others in their industry.
State of the X: Similarly, if your customer base is large enough, you could send out a survey or poll to get some insights. Both customers and non-customers will be interested to see how they compare to overall results. If your customer base isn’t large enough, consider polling your social media audience, or if you have the budget, expanding out to non-customers and non-followers. We have done this in the past with our State of the Agency series.
Mega stats list: Round up the latest stats you can find on a topic in your niche. Be sure to credit the original data source, of course.
People love data. But not a lot of people love math. Be sure to include visuals wherever possible. Create your own branded images if you can (Canva makes this easy), linking to the source of course and including the name of the source right in the image. This is especially important if you’re adapting your visual from theirs. And don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo. Oftentimes you’ll see the same graph recreated by 10 different brands. if there are better ways to visualize the data, be the business that does that.
More data-driven blog post ideas
Curated stats list: Pull out key stats from your mega list and elaborate on them. Provide actionable takeaways.
Gather up and compare benchmarks from multiple reports across the web.
X Data-Backed Strategies/Reasons to
X Stats That Highlight the Importance of [Topic]
X [Topic] Myths Busted (With Data!)
Use Google Trends data
Share a success story/case study with data
Data-driven blog post template
Here’s a template you can use for a stats list blog post:
These types of posts are the ones your readers look forward to every year, month, or week.
Monthly ideas series: What creative ideas are your customers in need of each month? Team-building ideas? Social media ideas? Family fun ideas? Create a post for every month and add news ideas each year. We have tons of monthly marketing ideas post examples.
Gift guides: Suggest gift ideas applicable to your niche and your audience. You can suggest your products only, or a mix of product and include yours in the list.
Themed challenge: Announce a challenge you’re running, either with yourself, your team, or get your audience involved, and then report on it at the end of the month/season. Share what was hard, what was easy, what you learned, and more.
Event predictions: Is there an annual event that is popular in your niche? For us, it’s Google Marketing Live and in the past, we’ve shared predictions on what the event will cover. Then, when your predictions come true, you can insert a humble brag into your event recap post.
Annual conference takeaways/nutshell version: Readers love posts that distill a conference or event down into 10 or so key takeaways. This is helpful if they weren’t able to attend, or if they did attend, they’re often interested to see how your takeaways compare to theirs and/or others.
National day/national month-inspired posts: Which national days apply to your business or business values? Whether it’s World Kindness Day, National Children’s Dental Health Day, or even National Backward Day, you can get lots of creative inspiration here. One example for you: August is National Black Business Month. Here’s How to Get Involved.
If you need, say, a master list of all the social media holidays, national days, monthly awareness themes, and more, look no further than The Big List of 422 Social Media Holidays for 2022. You’re welcome.
More seasonal blog post ideas
X Things [Event/Season/Holiday] Can Teach Us About [Topic]
Stats roundup about that season, topic, event, or holiday
Your coverage: Even if other blogs are beating you to it, it’s still good to have your own coverage on an important announcement. If your readers are used to your tone and language, they’ll find it easier to understand a topic through your coverage on it. Plus, if you’ve been blogging consistently, you’ve likely become their trusted go-to!
Your take on it: Be careful with this one, especially if it’s a sensitive topic.
Resources list: In some cases, you might be better off sharing a round-up of helpful posts and resources on an important issue, with summaries.
Updates roundup: If there have been a lot of little updates and announcements in your niche that aren’t newsworthy in and of themselves, compile them into a roundup. Or, collect the major events and updates you’ve reported on over a period of time and create a compilation with distilled versions of each.
If your industry has an active Twitter community, this can be a great source to get perspectives, insights, and sentiments on an issue. Just make sure you use direct quotes, and if you paraphrase something, check with that person first to make sure you got it right.
News update blog post template
Here’s a template you can use for your news update blog post.
Theme style: Share a list, but use a movie, playlist, animal, or other category analogy. For example, if each item were a song/animal/movie, which one would it be?
Analogy method: Compare a process or strategy to a popular movie, relatable everyday activity, or something else you are passionate about. Lots of opportunities for puns here.
Find a post that is driving the most goal completes and create spinoffs. Even if it doesn’t rank or drive as much traffic, the traffic it does drive may be well worth it.
Verticalize your content. If a post with general ideas or tactics performs well, create industry or category-specific iterations of that post.
And there you have it. A whopping 118 ways to interest, intrigue, educate, inspire, and inform your readers in a way that supports your content plan, marketing goals, and growth strategy.
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Kristen is the Head of Marketing at Hatch, a customer communication platform for service-based businesses. She was previously the Senior Managing Editor at WordStream. Her cat Arnold has double paws on every paw, and she finds life to be exponentially more delightful on a bicycle.
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