One of the best ways to target keywords and improve your organic rankings is to create blog content. However, in my experience, convincing clients to start a blog (much less regularly maintain one) often elicits confusion and even derision. MySpace and LiveJournal still have a stronghold on what people consider a “blog”. They picture food bloggers talking about how much their hubby just loved the cauliflower mac and cheese they made and wonder how something like that could fit in with their brand. 

Your blog is one of your main platforms for communicating with your customers. You can post news updates, industry insights, success stories, and even product reviews for new items that you offer. You choose the length. You choose the frequency. You choose the keywords. 

This guide will serve as a tool to show you how to develop a content plan that benefits your current marketing strategy. You don’t need to constantly feel pressure to come up with new blog post ideas. As long as you focus on your goals, you can come up with dozens of ideas in just one hour. Follow this process to create goal-driven content that drives results.

1. Use the Hub and Spoke Model

If you are looking for an organized way to develop blog post ideas, consider the hub-and-spoke model. Simply put, you start with a hub of core products, services, or goals and then expand them into spokes of keywords which then turn into ideas. You can focus on specific hubs when you need to push certain products while keeping an eye on the various keywords that you use. 

We are going to use this model as the base for the brainstorming and content creation process. For the duration of this post, we are going to use a nonprofit organization as an ideation example.

2. Identify Your Top Goals 

Start by assembling your top products or goals that you want to drive traffic to. What services need more exposure? What pages do you wish would rank higher? You can have as many hubs as you want, but your team will likely only be able to focus on one at a time. 

Below, the nonprofit that we are using as an example identified four key services that they wanted to support through their blog content:

• Increase donated items to their main location.
• Grow financial donations from individuals and corporations.
• Encourage more volunteers and community participation.
• Boost exposure of the nonprofit within the local community.

These become the key hubs.

(For another example, a bakery would develop hubs like wedding catering, corporate catering, and birthdays. A SaaS company would build ideas around different features or target audiences.)

For now, you can ignore the other hubs and focus on one core goal, then you can return to the other topic when you are ready.

3. Build Keywords Around Your Main Hubs

Once you have your hubs, it’s time to develop keywords that you can use to create blog post ideas. You can develop these in multiple ways. Some companies do keyword research through sites like SEMRush (here is a great resource list with keyword tools), but if you’re just starting out you can pick keywords that you know relate to your brand and that you want to specifically target. 

Below, we have added to the flow chart to show what these keywords look like once they are added to the main hubs. These are the spokes that you will build onto your hub. Those with a keen eye can see how these keywords will quickly become ideas for your blog.

4. Create Blog Topics Based on Your Keywords

Now that you have your hub and spokes, you can turn your spokes into concrete ideas. (This is why keyword research is important. If you only have a few keywords and phrases, then you will likely struggle to come up with fresh blog post ideas.) 

You can also use this process to stagger your keywords to meet your SEO goals. Add long-tail, hyper-local, and competitive keywords, and then determine which ones you want to prioritize.

Below, you can see how blog topics have been added to the spokes of our chart.

So far, this process has generated 10 unique blog topics around specific keywords that your brand would want to rank for. If you complete this process with your various other spokes, you could develop 30-50 blog ideas just within an hour of ideation. 

You can speed up this process by making it interactive. You can send out a spreadsheet and ask your coworkers to create blog content around a list of keywords. You can also meet together for a brainstorming meeting that uses this controlled method for coming up with relevant ideas.

5. Add Descriptions to Your Blog Post Ideas

Oftentimes, team members will come up with several ideas, feel excited and inspired to write about them, and then forget what various ideas meant or needed to cover by the time they return to their desks. During your ideation meeting, ask one person to take notes and fill in descriptions or ask everyone to add context to their ideas before they leave. 

I typically switch these ideas to spreadsheet form. I also use the same spreadsheet to track the keywords I have already used for a brand and to easily find similar internal links that I can add. Your content spreadsheet should include:

• Blog title or proposed headline
• Description of expected content
• Examples of subheads
• Resource links

This is what the spreadsheet would look like based on the nonprofit’s ideation.

What started as a hub with four goals has developed into multiple blog topics that you can start writing today.

6. Fill In Your Editorial Calendar

The final step in this process is to add the blog topics to your editorial calendar. While you may have dozens of blog post ideas, you likely only have a small bandwidth to write about them. Consider picking a theme for each month or varying the topics each week to change up the content.

Don’t let writer’s block keep you from blogging. This process should help you come up with as many ideas as you need and show you how strategic blog content can support your marketing efforts.

Header Image by Johannes Plenio from Pixabay