When your company has decided to adopt an inbound marketing strategy, blogging is one of the first components you can implement. 81% of U.S. online consumers trust information and advice from blogs, reports BlogHer. Because your customers are looking for information online, your business will suffer without a content strategy in place. But when you’re just getting started, it can be a challenge to find the best niche to blog about. 
Try these tips to help focus your blogging efforts.
Start With Your Buyer Personas
Your blog needs to be a valuable resource that provides educational and relevant content. The way to find the best niche to blog about, is to start with your audience. Who are you targeting? You need to clearly define who your audience is through your buyer personas in order to effectively speak to them through your blog content.
Think about what types of topics and formats will be relevant and helpful to your audience. Vary the types of blog posts you publish to keep your audience interested and bring in traffic. And in the beginning, consistency will be your best friend. Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5x more traffic and 4.5x more leads than companies that published between 0 - 4 monthly posts, according to HubSpot.
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Choose The Right Keywords
Doing keyword research can help you to find the best niche to blog about. Again, think about your buyer personas. What challenges and questions do they have? Even when your business offers a product or service within a broad industry, your best customers likely have a few things in common. Then try a quick Google search to see what answers you get to common questions your customers have online. You can look at the autofill for more ideas, as well as the suggested search terms at the bottom of the page.
Use this research to inform your blogging strategy. Look for ranking opportunities among the list of keywords you’ve created. Make sure to focus your efforts on long tail keywords, which you’ll have a better chance of ranking for in search engine results.
Your Product Or Service
It is also necessary to understand the value of your company’s product or service. It’s not enough to know what you do, you need to know how you solve a problem or provide a solution for someone else. And to ultimately convert blog visitors into customers, you’ll need to educate them through relevant content. But remember, your content isn’t all about you. Keep self-promotion out of your blog posts and keep educating your readers as the primary goal.
Don’t make the mistake of only blogging about subjects that relate directly to your product or service. Although you don’t want random, unrelated blog posts, you do have some flexibility. If you sell fitness equipment for example, you wouldn’t want to just blog about how great a certain treadmill is. You could also share tips for living a healthy lifestyle. Chances are, people are looking to make some part of their life easier. What suggestions or tips can you give them?
Utilize Social Media
Social media is a great tool for better understanding the interests of your audience. Pay attention to what is being said on your social media profiles or blog posts. You may also want to check out sites like Quora and Reddit to see what topics related to your industry or product are being discussed. Setting up social listening tools can help you to follow the bigger conversation going on amongst your audience.
Check Out Your Competitors
You can use your competitors to grow and to help you find the best niche to blog about. Take a look around the website, blog and social media presence of your competitors. Look at their messaging and offerings to determine ways to differentiate yourself. See what kinds of topics they cover on their blog and if you can take inspiration from it. If they are doing something well, then use that as a learning opportunity and a chance to improve for your own company.
