Every blog should have a clear purpose, after all blogging is a tool that you are using in order to gain a rapport with your customers, website visitors, and prospective buyers. A blog should never be aimless, or left in shambles, or worse published half finished (gasp). You have to feel comfortable with your topic to ensure you will produce the best quality content you can. Coming up with a topic is hard stuff, we feel your pain, and trust me when I say that no one here has ever come in on a Monday morning (or any day really) and said, "I know what I want to blog about today yay!" Picking a blog topic takes planning, research, and time to select, and shouldn't be taken lightly. After all, it could be the difference between people reading it, or not. Need help getting started? Take a look at ImageWorks' best blog topic choosing practices!

Define your goal. Everyone has goals, whether they are career goals, life goals, or education goals, why not have a blogging goal? First of all, let's define what a "topic" is. A topic is the subject of your blog. So, for us here at ImageWorks we like to use topics about inbound marketing, web design, video marketing, etc. However these topics are too broad to cover in just one blog post. You're going to want to narrow it down to something you can cover in 600-800 words. Here are some examples of topics we've written about:

• Content optimization

• Website redesign strategies

• Social media marketing platforms

Next, you need to define what you want to achieve from your blog. Is your business looking to generate more leads? Help improve your brand awareness? Drive traffic to your site? After you've figured that all out, you will need to determine your title, (or working title because you can change it at any point). Think of your working title as the guide to your post. You want all of your content to tie into or back to your title. This ensures that your blog post will be clearly focused. So you would take a topic like, "SEO Strategies" and turn it into a title like, "How do I Optimize my Content." Simple enough right?

Determine what worked for your blog in the past. Driving traffic to your site is important, and sometimes blogging is a really opportune way to get people visiting. Take a look at some of the blogs that you've published already, are there any posts that visitors really responded to positively? Once you've found a few examples take a closer look at them to determine why they worked so well for you. Some questions you may want to reflect on are:

• Was one blog post more SEO friendly than others?

• Was there a keyword involved that spiked a lot of views?

• Did you have a catchy title that made people want to click?

Take into consideration the keywords you are ranking for. All topics are going to utilize keywords. Keywords are important, and they are often where you come up with industry relevant topics for your business blog (They are also usually in the title). That means having an SEO-friendly topic, with keywords that relate to the message you are trying to convey, can be a good thing. There are really just two things you will have to consider when you are trying to pick out an SEO-friendly topic for your blogs. 

• What is your target audience is searching for?

• What are the top searched keywords for your industry?

Need help determining your target audience? Download our FREE buyer persona development worksheet!