A while ago I wrote that Seo Isn’t Magic but It’s Hard work. I too find that writing targeted content that potential clients will be searching for is hard work. Being a bit of a gear head I’m way more likely to be interested in expounding on technical topics that will interest others of my ilk. Unfortunately often they’re doing the same, or similar things to me, so they’re not really my target audience.

Today I figured I'd at least try to round-up some ways you can inspire yourself with some blog topics. Hopefully the research pique's my interest in topics that target my desired audience.

Your Direction

While it's fairly obvious to some it's still worth mentioning that the first item you need to do is define your audience. It's just like defining your target market in a business (and ultimately is probably the same thing). For me my target market is:

<ol>
    <li>Looking for someone to build their website</li>
    <li>Has a preference for WordPress as a platform</li>
    <li>Owns a small to medium-sized business and is interested in web marketing</li>
    <li>Wants to build a long-term relationship and continually work on iterating their site</li>
</ol>

Secondarily my audience is also:

<ol>
    <li>Programmers for applications (mainly Rails) that are looking for a designer or front end coder</li>
</ol>

I place them in that order currently because most of my income comes from the first set of people. Yes I may not find all of the traits I'm looking for in each client but they need to have a few to be in my target market and thus my target for my blog.

They Want to Know

So since I have an idea of whom I should be writing for I now need to try to figure out what items they're likely to search for when wanting a website built. Some topics may include:

<ul>
    <li>Why use WordPress instead of Drupal, Blogger, Joomla&#133;</li>
    <li>I thought WordPress was just a blogging software</li>
    <li>What's the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org</li>
    <li>How important is site speed? How about in SEO rankings</li>
    <li>What type of questions do I ask a web designer when I'm trying to figure out who to hire?</li>
    <li>Do I need to hire a big agency or can a solo freelancer do the job?</li>
    <li>What type of process should I expect during a web design project?</li>
    <li>How do I get good SEO on my Blog posts</li>
</ul>

Yeah I'm giving away ideas here. Feel free to jump off my list and write some of your own items for your site.

Writing Your Content

So you've got a list, now you just need to write stuff down. Best practice when starting out is to just write. don't think about how it will sound just get the gist of the content down on the page. Once you've got it written then edit it. Don't worry about using the latest and greatest tool. If you use MS Word and know it, use it. If all you have is NotePad, TextEdit, that's fine just get the words down.

Edit it

So it's down now. Read it, re-read it, and read it again. Tweak it each time. Blog posts don't need to be long but they need to contain good content. Your blog post is done when you can't take anything else out. It shouldn't ramble or be filled with meaningless fluff.

Really that’s all you need to do to get some content on your site. Sure you can add images, and using the correct markup for the site will help maximize the SEO benefits of the content but I’ll address that next time.