The Secret to Never Running Out of Topic Ideas for your Blog

It’s the number 1 struggle for anyone who writes a blog for their audience. Add to this the difficulty of rendering a technical, specialist subject into blogs that aren’t just understandable for a layperson, but are interesting too. How on earth are you supposed to know what your clients want to read every month?!

My opinion? Most business owners are approaching their blog topics in a completely topsy turvy way.

Wouldn’t you rather write a blog every week, fortnight, or month, about something that really interests you? And, by default, will benefit and interest your ideal clients too? While how-to guides and deep dives on client FAQs have their place on your blog, these will get old pretty soon, for you and your audience. 

We’re going to need to think more creatively to stop ourselves running out of content.

And guess who never runs out of content?

Who’s been spinning stories and capturing attentions by the minute from the beginning?

You guessed it: the news!

Katie, what the hell does the news have to do with my very specialist, technical business? 

Let me tell you dear reader.

If you can find a story that works as the perfect analogy for what you do, you’ve got a ready-made blog post that will instantly capture attention AND help your audience of nonspecialists to identify with what you have to say. More than this, you can use your blog to explore a news story through the lens of your own beliefs, values, and experiences.

Your ideal client is someone who has similar values to you, so by making these values publicly available you’re instantly going to draw people to you who share them. Equally importantly, you’ll repel people who fundamentally disagree with you so you’ll never have to work with them. All without having to even think about what they might be experiencing that day.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean, using Sally the Psychologist as the subject. Sally specialises in helping her clients lose weight by forming healthy eating habits using counselling to improve their relationship with food. She’s struggling with content ideas for her blog, so she’s trying out my theory for a few weeks.

The controversial opinion

Putting a controversial opinion out into the ether is scary, especially when you’re just starting up and are working flat out to win hearts and minds.

But, can you name a single successful person who doesn’t have a controversial opinion on SOMETHING they’re an expert in? Sheep don’t succeed in business, but those brave enough to stand out will reap rewards ten-fold.

One day Sally notices a news story pop up about someone who has lost half their body weight in 6 weeks from running alone: they didn’t change anything in their diet. Suddenly, sales of running shoes are through the roof.

This goes against everything Sally knows to be true about real weight loss. She decides to write a timely blog about why this weight loss is not long term, and why counselling and affirmations are in fact a much more sustainable and long-term solution. Regular exercise plays its part, of course (she’d hate to suggest that running isn’t good for your health) but it needs to be done in conjunction with other healthy habits.

By writing this, Sally pits herself against the status quo, and puts her true beliefs out there for her audience to judge. As she hits publish, Sally feels a little bit nervous – what if everyone disagrees with her and she never gets any more clients?

Sally did lose a few members of her audience: they were too attached to their daily doughnut and preferred the quick option of running their excess weight off for 6 months before relapsing. But the people who truly wanted to develop healthy eating habits and lose weight took notice. She gained a few new connections because of her blog, and one of them went on to be a paying client.

The totally unrelated yet weirdly relevant celebrity scandal

Sometimes, it’s a slow news day, and the latest celebrity scandal works its way up the breaking news list. Even Sally is struggling to find something that she can relate to her business. What does a famous actor’s third divorce have to do with healthy eating habits?

Just for fun, she wonders what this newly single man might say if he were to book an appointment with her.

“What can I say, Sally? I tried to commit, but the same thing just keeps happening! I know I should be committing to complex carbohydrates, and for a while it works out, but then I go away for a shoot and all of a sudden there’s cheese boards after dinner at the restaurant, there’s a cooked breakfast every morning, and suddenly complex carbohydrates for the rest of my life just seems so…bland”.

Sally chuckles and decides to write a transcript of the imaginary conversation in her blog – it gets her highest engagement yet, and even some shares. Who could have predicted that?

This type of blog shows off Sally’s sense of humour and, in doing so, also conveys why it’s so difficult to build lasting, healthy habits.

The cautionary tale

By writing about a news story in which someone goes down the wrong path or perhaps even falls foul of bad practice, you can explain to your audience why this happened and how they can avoid doing so in their own work or personal lives.

This week, Sally has noticed a news story about a very famous celebrity who caused an entire social media platform to go into meltdown after posting something provocative. It’s scary how desperate the young fans are to follow everything their idol does, including her looks. What is this doing to their self-esteem, and body image, she wonders?

Sally writes a heartfelt and passionate article about how easy it is to fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, and how this can start to manifest itself in harmful behaviours like disordered eating to try and achieve an unrealistic beauty ideal. If we can learn why these triggers exist in the first place, it’s possible to develop healthier relationships with food and with our bodies, she argues.

The day after she publishes, a new connection reaches out to Sally, explaining that she has tried every diet under the sun to try to drop down to a dress size 8. When she read Sally’s article, it really hit home and she realised that low self-esteem was playing a role in the problem. She’d love to know more about what Sally does.

This type of blog takes your reader on a journey. The subject of the blog develops a problem that the reader themselves might be experiencing, but the subject takes the long way round, trying the wrong solution for them before finally discovering the solution offered by you, which will fix the problem. The reader will be able to learn from the mistakes made by others and, hopefully, skip straight to the tried and tested method that you know works.

So how do I get started?

Being creative is sometimes the last thing on our list when, as business owners, we have a million and one things to get done before the end of the day. It’s hard to see what more you could be writing for your audience to stand out, especially if you’re not convinced of the level of interest in your specialist subject.

But, putting the to-do list to one side, what could you achieve if blog writing became something to have fun with? Or, better yet, it became an outlet for your thoughts and experiences to help the world understand the real you? The smallest thing could spark inspiration, and you never know where it might take you.

If you’re still struggling to generate leads despite spending hours creating content, I have a more intensive guide to help you move from stuck to soaring. Download yours by clicking this link.