Startup Content Marketing: How to Brainstorm & Validate Lucrative Blog Ideas for Your Startup
Updated: May 16
In this short article, we'll be discussing startup content marketing and the entire process of brainstorming startup blog ideas and creating startup blog content that turns your blog visitors into sign-ups and customers.
The process of creating only the best content for your ideal target audience STRICTLY depends on the lucrative ideas you can brainstorm - And not what SEO tools tell you! This process is usually ignored by most startup & company blogs I look up these days - @realsimonzaku_
The sole purpose of this step is to primarily help you publish only the best possible blog posts that your potential customers want to consume every single time.
Whenever I want to write a new blog post for my content clients over at SimonWrites Agency, I begin by spending 15 to 20 minutes juggling post ideas and putting them down.
This could be in my notebook or my digital note keeper, Evernote.
It's an easy strategy I am going to teach you in this article.
Coming Up with Lucrative Blog Content Ideas Your Customers Want.
This process requires you to think of both your products and target customers at the same time.
You ask yourself questions like;
“What does my customer look for on Google?”,
“What does my target buyer want to solve?” and
“What blog content can I write that will answer specifically what he’s looking out for and eventually get him to buy from us?”.
In a nutshell, you brainstorm topic ideas that will;
Attract potential buyers,
Educate them and provide utmost value and;
Get them excited about your products or services and eventually turn them into paying customers.
Listen, every content you publish must take every potential buyer on a marketing journey. To make this easier for me, when planning blog content for my content marketing clients, I use a strategy I call, the 3 Es of writing high-converting blog posts;
Excite potential buyers o read.
Educate them.
Entice them to pay for your products or services.
Here’s a practical example;
When working with one of my clients, UniclixApp, we employed this strategy when developing new content ideas for the Uniclix blog.
The goal was to get small businesses who were either looking for social media management tools online or were already using a tool but wanted an alternative that was less expensive or easier to use.
A quick brainstorm would yield results like;
“Buffer Alternative You Should Try Today”.
“Free Social Media Management Tools for Small Businesses in 2019”
“Best Hootsuite Alternative for Influencers and Small Businesses.
“X Steps to Become a Better Social Media Manager for Your Business”.
At this stage, no need to worry about how well your titles or headlines are.
Just get the ideas out first. In minutes, you would have brainstormed around 10 to 20 blog post ideas that follow the 3 Es of writing blog posts that attract buyers to your company blog every single time.
Get it?
Let's be practical;
STEP 1; Get a pen and paper and I want you to think of content ideas your startup's ideal target customer is searching for on Google and then write them down.
STEP 2: Keyword Research - this step helps you validate your content ideas to make sure you're writing blog content your target customers are searching for.
PS: Need a Content Writer Marketer for Your Brand? Simply Reply to This Email to Enquire About My Services.
Step 3: My Secret Keyword Approach to Validate Your Content Ideas.
Now you may be wondering why I don’t "validate" my blog ideas (at the first step) before even going ahead to do keyword research.
Well, I never recommend that!
I believe that’s where most b2b startups get it wrong and fail at growing their brand blogs.
Most times, we try to think for our buyers. This leads to a ton of assumptions hence content creators end up creating blog content customers don’t need.
What you should do is use any keyword tool to find out what your potential buyers are searching for. By doing this, you can eliminate content ideas your audience are not interested in.
This is why I recommend every digital company to have at least a keyword research tool for their content writing and SEO purposes. Here, I use Ahrefs, when doing content planning and keyword research for my SEO clients.
With proper keyword research, you evaluate your content ideas based on what your target customers are searching for online. This means you get to strike out what your audience doesn’t seem so interested in.
With the traditional method, we're used to, you probably make wrong assumptions about your target buyers all the time.
Let’s learn how to evaluate your ideas by doing keyword research using any keyword tool that you have.
There are lots of them online but we use and recommend Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs.
Identify the main keyword or phrase on each blog post idea.
Run it on Ahrefs (or any keyword research tool).
Select all keywords with at least 1000 monthly searches.
For our clients with new blogs, we like to target less competitive keywords or what is referred to as “low-hanging fruit” in search engine optimization or keywords with low keyword difficulty in Ahrefs. Months in, we can start aiming for keywords with higher keyword difficulty as we build a stronger backlink profile on the client’s website.
How do you identify the main keywords in your blog post ideas?
You simply pick the main word or phrase that best describes the whole article (or title).
For example, with our post ideas for UniclixApp, the main keywords would be, “Buffer Alternative”, “Free Social Media Management Tools”, “Hootsuite Alternative” and “Become a Better Social Media Manager”.
After running your keywords in Ahrefs and select the best possible topics to write on. I like to go with keywords that have at least 1000 monthly searches and a considerable amount of clicks.
This helps us target keywords our ideal target audience is searching for on Google.
Lastly, we think of 2-5 different headlines for each content idea that we’ve selected and pick the best possible one for each blog topic.
Selecting the perfect headline is a crucial step because headlines can make or break your business blog, its traffic, and its click-through rate (CTR) potential.
Each headline on your startup blog must;
Speak directly to your ideal target customers,
Not exceeding 75 characters.
It can get a bit tricky because writing headlines that ‘speak’ directly to your customers tend to be longer than 75 characters but with practice and experience, you can start writing multiple headlines for a topic that is high converting, and short.
Aim for 50 characters per headline and write. As I said, with practice, you will be writing perfect, high-converting headlines for your business blog.