Lead Gen Foundations: A Year's Worth of Blog Posts for Your Business

Delve into the less well-known features of your product. Offer a look into how to use your product in a totally unique way. How-to guides that are tailored to a specific audience always work well, particularly if you’re combining your product/service with a tool that’s already on everyone’s mind.

Be a bit cheeky. Compare your product/service to a similar offering from one of your competitors. Don’t be afraid to show why you’re the clear winner. Just make sure that you effectively highlight pros and cons; do a little research to prove you know what you’re talking about. A shameless plug for your own product, without decent backup, won’t get you anywhere.

Set out to ask your customers for feedback on your product via social media. Create a new blog post that answers any questions you encounter. Make sure to address everything. Total transparency is the aim here.

Feature your customers in your post. Interview them not only on using your product/service but also on their business journey. Make sure that your content is relatable - you want to forge a connection with your readers.

Conduct some social media polls that your readers might find interesting and build a detailed post around the results. Be a bit edgy in your approach and you’ll probably find an influx of responses based purely on controversy.

Take a look at the social profiles of industry leaders in your sphere to see what they’re talking about. Emulate their posts to set yourself up as a bit of a thought leader yourself.

Create a list of the “top” companies/websites/books/podcasts/influencers in your particular industry. Make sure to link back to them. Notify them once the list is up and watch the share-rate climb.

Use BuzzSumo to analyse trending articles. Improve on those articles in your own way and put a fresh spin on them.

Take a peek at your competition’s blog. Write a better version of their posts. Obviously, you can do better. Prove it.

Take a look at answerthepublic.com. Type in a keyword and watch it throw out a bucket load of questions that you can answer in your blog.

Search Twitter for trending topics and do a fantastic new opinion piece targeted at your specific audience.

Poke around on Reddit for upvoted posts in your particular niche. Use this content to create a blog post that digs deeper and covers more ground than the original.

Take a closer look at the tools you use in your business on a daily basis. These can be physical or digital tools. Offer your audience some insights on how and why to use the same tools you do.

Share some takeaways from a recent conference, workshop, tutorial, webinar, or podcast. People are always dealing with a certain level of FOMO from events they were unable to attend. Be the person that lets them in.

Do some write-ups on things to avoid in your vertical. Sometimes, telling people what NOT to do can be more effective than telling them what to do.

Write about processes and achievements that you’ve perfected. Don’t be afraid to put your knowledge and successes out there. You’re helping people with your content, after all. I’ve created content on how to set up killer email campaigns, and how to use APIs effectively, among other things. The response has been phenomenal.

Tap into your crystal ball and make an industry-related prediction. Further down the line, if you get it right, you have some more content to create on how right you were. If you didn’t get it right, no one will notice anyway. It’s all good.

Do some case studies on your best customers. Show how successful they’ve been as a result of your help. Promote this content not only on your blog but on email and social media too.

Turn one long post into a series of shorter posts. This allows you to go deeper into a particular topic whilst hooking your audience and motivating them to “tune in next time” to find out more.

Be brave enough to get personal. Open up about your pains, your failures, your mistakes. Let people in on some “dirty little secrets” from your business journey. No one’s perfect. Everyone loves honesty. Make your honesty marketable.

Find a trending topic and turn it on its head. Take the opposite viewpoint and defend it. Be smart about it - only take a standpoint if it makes sense. You might get some heat for this one but that’s still good. There’s no such thing as bad press, remember?

Write about something that you’re learning right now. It’s good for people to see that you’re not a total know-it-all. Share what you’ve learned so far, and what’s still coming. Take your audience along with you on your journey. People find it comforting to see that even “thought leaders” have to keep on learning as they go along.

Do more of what’s currently working for you. Take a look at your analytics, hone in on the stuff that’s getting you the most traffic. Re-purpose content with a new slant, an opposing view, fresh insights.