How do we consistently generate business blog post ideas that sell?

Are you struggling to come up with new business blog post ideas?

Or maybe you don’t know where to start?

Whether you’ve got a blog, or a learning centre for your buyers (my preference), I’m going to suggest the best ways to come up with blog post ideas to achieve the greatest impact on your leads and sales.

First up…

Why are you writing blog posts?

Most businesses are probably writing blog posts to generate visits and new leads/sales.

But many businesses waste their time writing content at the top and middle of the buyer’s journey, with a lot of fluffy content…

…content that never seems to get many visitors 🤔

If you create content for your buyers at the bottom of the funnel, what impact could have on motivating your buyers to get in touch?

How could buyer-focused content earn trust quicker and attract more high-quality traffic?

How could your sales team use that same content in the sales process?

If your blog posts and learning centre content talked in an open and honest way to your buyers, how important could that be to sales, versus top of the funnel content that doesn’t engage or inspire?

Your future customers want someone they can trust

A goal that could transform your sales is to write content that answers the questions that your ideal buyers are asking.

1. Start by asking your sales people

The most important resource for new blog topic ideas is your sales people.

What are the questions they’re asked every day by your prospects and customers?

Don’t start by using AI chat or blog topic/question generators.

Keep it simple.

What are your buyers asking you right now?

Let’s have a look at a B2C example of an estate agent.

What are some of the questions that property sellers ask estate agents?

• Is now a good time to put my house on the market?
• What price should I set when putting my house on the market?
• If my house isn’t selling, should I lower asking prices?
• How should I present our property in the right way before putting it on the market?
• How do I find an estate agent who truly has my best interests at heart?
• What should we not fix before selling our house?

In your business, have a brainstorming session with your sales team, or send an email to your sales people, and ask them to send you the 20 most common questions asked by buyers.

Turn those questions into blog posts/articles on your website.

You might even get 50 or 100 questions and that’s all you need to create your first batch of blog/learning centre posts.

Or maybe you get 20 of your most commonly asked questions, and go away to write articles about each of them.

Then come back and brainstorm again.

If you can’t get the questions this way, then maybe you don’t know your audience as well as you should.

Should you be having more conversations with buyers?

2. Next visit AnswerthePublic.com

AnswerthePublic.com is a quick way to get a good list of the questions that your audience is asking.

Visit it now and have a play.

But…

It won’t be as good as asking your sales people. Still, it could fire up some inspiration, and deliver some questions you had previously missed.

2. Ask ChatGPT

As you can see by the crossed-through words above, we used to recommended AnswerthePublic.com.

In 2022 that was bought by famous SEO expert Neil Patel, but the AI Text Generator ChatGPT was launched, which is a lot better than AnswerthePublic.com.

The rest is history.

ChatGPT is so powerful. It gives you insight into the questions that buyers ask in your space/sector.

But the best route is still to ask your sales people for the questions they get asked every day. When marketing is working well with the sales team, rather than in a silo, it always leads to better results.

Build good relationships with your sales people and it will help your business in so many ways.

Not only do your salespeople talk to prospects every day, but they’re great people to interview to help you with the content of your blog posts.

You could even experiment with asking your sales people about what needs to be in the blog post, and then see if ChatGPT can turn that blog post outline into a post for your learning centre.

You won’t know if you don’t try.

How do you get these blog post questions/ideas from ChatGPT?

1. Visit ChatGPT – I recommend the paid version which includes the latest version of ChatGPT, but you can also get ideas with the free version. Maybe that’s all you need. I prefer the paid version.
2. Insert a prompt like: “Give me a list of the top 20 questions that buyers ask salespeople when buying [insert your product/service].”
3. ChatGPT will pump out a list of beautiful buying questions – awesome hey!

3. Use Google to get quality blog post ideas

Google gives the following powerful advice about how to come up with new content ideas:

(NB. Google created this advice to help you get inspired. Note that it wasn’t designed to reflect how Google’s ranking works.)

Use to Google to find a desirable idea

Search queries can be a good source of inspiration for what to create about and how to enrich your new/existing content.

Queries can help you identify which questions and informational needs people have, for instance:

• Search for a blog topic or a question that interests you on Google, and then check the ‘people also asked’ and ‘related searches’ sections to get additional related ideas.
• Check out your site’s top and trending queries in Search Console Insights and think if you should create more related content.
• Use Google Trends to identify what people are searching for in the context of a topic/query that interests you.

Use Google to find out what good content is

Once you identify a desirable blog post idea that you think could be interesting for enough people, try searching for it on Google to take inspiration from existing content.

By innovating and improving on it, you can create something that would be valuable and interesting for your audience.

It’s also important to have an engaging page title that is relevant to the content and to how your audiences might search for it on Google.

You can read more tips in Google’s SEO starter guide and helpful content guide.

Help people discover your content

Once you have created a good piece of content, consider helping relevant audiences discover it by putting it out there in front of them, for instance:

• Share links to your new content in places where your potential audiences can be found, such as on social media, groups, articles in other websites and forums.
• When relevant, link from your site’s most popular pieces of content to your new content to help readers discover it.

Create modern looking & visually appealing content

Make sure the content’s presentation looks modern and inviting and that the texts can be easily read on mobile devices.

Visuals can be powerful, such as large high quality images and videos.

Conclusion

Creating engaging articles and blog posts doesn’t have to be complicated.

By understanding what type of content resonates with your target audience, speaking with your sales people, using ChatGPT, researching on Google and utilising keyword-research tools, UK small businesses can easily generate effective blog post ideas that sell.

With these simple tips, creating content that captures the attention of your target audience will become much easier — resulting in greater visibility and success for your business.

(If you haven’t checked out the business framework They Ask, You Answer, I’d recommend you do.)