Blogging has become an essential part of marketing in today’s society and the amount of businesses using blogs has increased dramatically.  As outbound marketing techniques continue to grow, businesses are beginning to realize just how important inbound marketing can be for your company’s success.  Hubspot recently did a survey, which interviewed 644 business executives to find that outbound marketing techniques averaged a total of $373 to generate one lead while inbound marketing techniques only cost $143 per lead.  According to Forbes, from 2009-2011 the percentage of businesses with a blog grew from 48%-65%. With this many businesses using blogs, it is definitely a marketing aspect that your company does not want to miss out on. 

Blogging is an easy way to connect with your customers online and share information throughout the web.  Choosing the right blog topics will fuel your SEO and allow you to generate more leads.  Additionally, blogging is a way of giving your company a voice and really connecting with them on a more personal level.  Building a successful business blog requires both commitment and effort and is something that needs to be constantly updated and monitored by your company.  It is important that your company decides on strong topics to blog about, as aimless blogging can be just as bad as not blogging at all.  With that being said here are five tips on how to pick a topic for your business blog:

• Decide on a goal

Before you go about choosing a topic to write about you must first decide on why you want to write this blog post.  What is the goal you hope to achieve? You could focus on generating more leads, spreading your voice on an important issue, driving traffic to your site or simply sharing your opinion.  Whatever the goal is you must decide on it first and then move on to choosing a topic that will help you accomplish it.

• Be SEO-friendly

This is probably the most important step in the process of choosing a good topic.  You have to figure out what topics your clients and potential clients are interested in or what they want to know more about.  You need to write something that ranks well in search engines so that it will pop up more often and more people will read it.  How do you choose something that will do well in search engines? Well it’s pretty simple; you have to look at your company’s keywords and see what’s important to your customers, while also keeping in mind that the topic must be relevant to your product or service. 

• Be specific

It is important that you don’t choose an extremely broad topic to blog about or else you will find yourself being pulled in too many directions without being able to decide on what is really important.  Once you have an idea of what you want to blog about you must narrow it down.  For example if you know you want to write a blog about Twitter instead of using a title like “Why is Twitter useful? You should be more specific and use something like “Why should your company use Twitter” or “How to Generate Leads with Twitter.” With this being said it is also important that you don’t choose a topic that is too specific.  If it’s too specific it probably wont show up in search engines and won’t attract any leads, as it will be very difficult to find. 

• Be Appropriate

Since this is a business blog you do not have complete creative freedom, as you still must be professional.  You want to avoid blogging about topics like politics, religion, or any other topics where people have strong beliefs towards one side or another.  By taking a strong stance on an important issue you risk losing a big portion of your audience. 

• Be Original

It is important that you pick fresh new topics so you are providing your customers with new information.  If you don’t have anything new to say you probably shouldn’t say anything at all.  Customers hate repetition and won’t be interesting in reading something they have already read.  With this being said it can be hard to find innovative new topics that haven’t already been blogged about, so if you decide to use a topic that has previously been used make sure your make yours unique by using new ideas and spreading your personality throughout the post.