How to pick your blog topic

If you need help coming up with blogging topics, there are plenty of options. You can use Google Analytics, free blogging topic ebooks, or many other resources. But once you finish a brainstorming session and have a list of blog topics, how do you narrow that list down? How do you decide what’s worth blogging about, and what’s not?

We’ve developed a system here at T&S that helps us make that decision. Our blog scoring system takes into account three factors.

1. Benefit

How beneficial will this topic be to both you and your readers? Will it actually help your target market? And is it likely to help you if they read it?

You could write purely promotional content that you’d love your audience to read. It would definitely benefit you! But if all they do is promote your services and products, they won’t be that beneficial to your audience. And just because they’re your audience doesn’t mean they’re a customer. It should benefit them even if they never buy what you sell.

On the flip side, you could write a blog article that is extremely helpful to your reader. But if it doesn’t benefit you and your organization to be seen as experts on that topic, it’s probably not worth it.

2. Easiness

Epic content takes an epic amount of time and effort to write. And while that’s great from time to time, you probably can’t keep up that pace on every blog article.

Balance those time-intensive articles with blog articles that are much easier to write. Save some time and energy so you can utilize it elsewhere.

3. Link Bait

Sure, your content may be great, but at some point, people have to actually click on a link somewhere to read your article!

Link bait is a term used for content that’s designed to attract the clicks. Given the blog title alone, how likely will people be to click through to read your actual article?

Final Score

Of course, you can use whatever scale you like. We use a 1 – 3 scale for each of the three factor

1 – Probably not

2 – Maybe, maybe not

3 – Almost definitely!

That gives us a score somewhere between 3 and 9. That score isn’t gospel by any means. But it is an indicator. We’re way more likely to blog about a 9 than we are a 6. And we typically throw out all 3’s.

Sound Painful?

You may hear that process, and think to yourself, “Wow, that sounds painful!” Maybe you find all of the blogging process painful, but believe it could be beneficial for your organization.

If that’s the case, feel free to read more about our blogging services. And if it looks like it’s worth a conversation, we’d be happy to talk!