3 Steps to Get Over "Blogger's Block" - How to Generate Blog Topics that Convert

Blogging for business growth is not just a writing exercise in which you cough up 500 words and call it a day. 

When you have clear understanding of what matters to you, your niche and your business, you can use this 3-step process to generate article ideas, so you won’t be staring at a blinking cursor on a blank screen again:

1. Write down the various aspects of _____ (business, relationship, career etc.) that your ideal clients care about.

There are different ways to start this brainstorming: e.g. the “day-in-life” exercise, your own experience/life story, current events, seasonal topics, your opinions on something happening in your field, or what riles you up about your industry etc.

Don’t constrain yourself to problems directly related to your products or services. Focus on what frustrates your audience in the broader category, and what inspires them.

Make sure you get into their heads, and understand what they think, how they act, and how they feel – this is the ticket to making your content personal and relatable.

2. Drill down and relate the solution they are looking for to the essential components of your process and expertise.

From step 1, you have a list of “challenges” “problems” “pains” and “desires.”

Now, we want to communicate why you are RELEVANT to your ideal clients by relating their challenges/desires to your process, skills, superpower, tools and expertise.

You can write the most epic article on the planet, but unless they understand why your content is relevant to them, they don’t care.
When working with clients, I often start with designing a signature system, which is a great way to articulate “what you do and how you do it” so you can confidently communicate your products’ or services’ relevance to your ideal clients.

From your signature system, you can break out one step, or one point within a step, and turn it into a post by first leading in with the problem it solves.

(If you have a 7-step system, and each system has 3 points, you can easily come up with 21 or more posts to write! Also, one step, or one point, may solve multiple symptoms, so you can write one post about each symptom that each point solves… do the math, it’s a goldmine!!)

Sometimes your solution may focus on the root cause of their problems, and the correlation may not be apparent to your readers. That’s why we want to cast a wider net in step 1, so we can drill down and relate their daily frustrations to your offering.

If there is a few steps between what they think their problem is, and the solution you offer (it happens often in the personal development space), you may have to start from the symptoms, educate your readers on the root cause and relate the root cause to the solution you provide.

Your content needs to articulate their “symptoms” – the thing that they are actively seeking solution for – and how your process, tools, experiences, talents etc. can help solve their problem.

3. Look at your marketing plan holistically and orchestrate your content to support your marketing effort and sales cycle.

Now you have a long list of stuff to write about, we need to filter and prioritize.

Your marketing calendar and sales cycle can inform when you write what. You can also fold in seasonal topics, current events, personal experience or client stories to make the content timely, relevant and relatable.

E.g. if you are launching a program, the content leading up to the launch should build awareness, get those who are interested in that particular topic to engage, build trust and boost your expert status.

Using content to support your marketing effort also means more than just publishing a blog post. Promoting the post to reach the right audience is as important, if not more so, than writing it.

Promoting content on various platform may mean writing them up slightly differently to suit the format and the audience.

Even with the variation, we need to ensure that the different pieces work synergistically with each other to communicate a cohesive message, an aligned narrative and your personality.