B2B Blogs | 3. Generate Topic Ideas

If you’ve been following this series on developing a B2B blog plan, you’ve completed the first steps and are on your way to creating a practical strategy designed to promote your business.

You’ve identified your top revenue drivers, the product/service lines that generate the largest proportion of company sales and profits. Perhaps you’ve created a pie chart similar to the one we're using for the sample company.

To keep things manageable, let's focus solely on the immediate goal, a three-month startup B2B blog plan, which we'll call Phase 1.

To make things concrete, let’s add some specifics to our sample company, an industrial fluids distributor with three top revenue generators:

Product Line 1: Metalworking fluids
Product Line 2: Stamping/drawing compounds
Product Line 3: Rust inhibitors

How do we translate these broad categories into specific blog topics? Focus on a few key questions:

What’s new?
What’s “hot”?
What’s current/timely (seasonal, holiday-based)?
What do your customers want to learn more about?
What are the most frequent questions customers ask?
What do you want your customers to understand better?
What would influence customers to choose your products/services over a competitors?
What would help customers understand how to use your products/services for optimal results?
What search terms do prospects/customers use when they're searching for your product/service?

You get the idea. These and any questions pertinent to your business should help you brainstorm a list of potential topics. Our sample company's blog topic list might resemble this illustration, with blog topic ideas clearly connected to the appropriate product category.

Don’t worry about perfecting the ideas now, just capture the gist and keep moving. Handle each targeted product/service line in sequence, and soon you’ll have a long list of topics.

Review the list you created and pinpoint which topics you want to tackle in the first three months. Remember, you only need 12 workable ideas, and you probably have at least that many topic ideas.

To prioritize, focus on first things first. Is it hot? New? Current? Time-bound? Linked to a season or impending holiday? Move those topics to the top of the list and flag them for immediate attention.

Make sure the topics are something you can turn into an effective blog post with relative ease. The goal is for your blog to work for you and your business, not for you to work for your blog.

You've generated a list of relevant topics, which is a significant step. Next time, we'll look at ways to translate these ideas into action. Then, we'll share some quick ideas for combining ideas to expand that plan.

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