Blog Post Ideas - Check your Referrals
Glen Allsopp / 
12 Comments / 
January 7th, 2008 / 
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Blogs are a great way to interact with your visitors and have fresh new content that can gain you extra visitors from search engines, but you lose the benefits of having a blog if you aren’t adding content to it and just letting it stay stale. With that in mind, I have to admit it’s not always easy adding new content on a regular basis, but I really like this idea to give you fresh thinking on what to write.
What I like to do is check my referrals, basically checking what keywords people are using in search engines to find my site, you can actually get some referrals that would make a good blog post, here’s an example of some referring search phrases to this website:
Although some of these may seem pretty obscure, and it’s not like there would be a lot of search engine traffic received when writing about any of these subjects, there are a few benefits to this method:
- New Content - The point of this post is to highlight another way you can think up content ideas from your blog, go and check phrases you have found in your search logs to see if there’s any questions people are asking that you feel you could answer with confidence and is relevant to your blog
- People want to know the answer - Although it’s not a huge volume of searches, I can see that a few people would like a dedicated post on how to become a top stumbleupon user, and as it’s relevant to my blog it’s clearly something that I could write about in the future.
- Guest Post Ideas - Not everything in your referrals is something you want to write about yourself, for example I probably wouldn’t write about ‘how did digitalpoint grow‘, but if a relevant blog like Community Spark was looking for guest posts it may give me something to talk about on another site, or even give them an idea for something to write about.
Still stuck for something to write? Some other blog content ideas include:
- Asking your users a question, do a poll or conduct some sort of survey to interact more with your readers and add new content to your site
- Tell a story, surely you have been involved in a few ‘incidents’ or ’situations’ regarding the niche of your blog, why not tell a story around something that has happened
- Share a tip, I didn’t just write this post because I seen that somebody else did, I checked my referrals and thought that some of the search phrases would be good blog posts to cover
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Thanks Glen. This is a great way of illustrating another value of looking at your web stats. We can learn so much, and as you point out, it can help steer us in the right direction.
Great post… this goes to show how much web analytics can help you. Not only are you finding out where your visitors are coming from, but what they want to learn about. Give them what you’re looking for, and you’ll see even more traffic. Great post!
Another technique that I find useful is asking family or friends who have no idea about the search industry what they wonder most about Google… there have been some interesting (and sometimes obscure) questions that I never would have thought of.
This may not work for everyone, but it has helped me write a post or two.
Thanks for the link! I love the idea of using referral information for inspiration and will definitely try that out next time my ideas dry up.
- Martin Reed
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I definitely agree that good blogging is a key for business, but there are those organizations that (like you!) just can’t get regular posts up, and it doesn’t do much good to start a blog if it is perpetually out-of-date because of infrequent updates. For those people, a traditional website with novel trafficking tools, like linking from websites like travelhqr.com would be better than an expired blog, IMO. Keep posting ideas for inspiration!
Blogging is the most active form of engagement on the Internet. They are preferred by search engines, and can help you expose yourself online. And you don’t need to spend 24/7 looking after them. One post a week is plenty. And each post only takes about an hour max. It’s helped my SEM Services a lot.
You can really learn a lot from taking a look at your website analytics for writing material.
It is tempting to blog on an ad hoc basis but that will mitigate the benefit.
Done regularly blogging is great for both reputation management and SEO if you have an engaged audience. The advise here is sound. Look at the where the traffic is coming from and adapt your behavior.
the problem with guests is that most of the time, they don’t leave anything behind, not a single mark to show what they originally came for. because of this, I resort to consulting my referrals every now and then.
sometimes, I also visit other “referring” sites to know what they are writing about. if i happen to feel their post, I write on that one too but I don’t rely too much from it.
btw, great post.