What blog topics should you write about?

Blogging is an extremely valuable component of content marketing, supplying your website with fresh new content that adds new keywords and SEO value as well as creating materials you can use on social media and your email newsletters. However, important as it may be, at the end of the day blogging is an investment.

Just one blog post can take several hours to publish once you factor in time for research, writing it, getting it proofed for errors, locating and adding the appropriate images, optimizing the SEO using a tool like YOAST or Rank Math, and then finally actually publishing the dang thing. If you are a small business owner blogging on your own, this is time spent away from actually running your business, helping customers, and making sales. If you are spending that much time away from running your business it is important that you are spending that time effectively and writing blog posts that are worth your while.

So, if you want the time you spend blogging to count what are the best blog topics to write about? Knowing what to write about, especially if you are someone like me who writes a ton of blog posts each month, isn’t always easy. For me though, I have found the best blogs and best blog post topics fall into one of two categories: evergreen content and current events.

Each of these categories adds its own particular value to your blog, but which is the best for you to focus on when writing blogs of your own? Here is a rundown of everything to know about the best blog topics and what part they should play in your strategy.

Evergreen Content

Evergreen content, as the name implies, is content that addresses topics that won’t just relevant today, tomorrow, next week, and even next month but for years to come. Evergreen information is subjects that people will always be timely (even if it’s a seasonal topic), always be searched for, and always be of value to readers. Depending on your business, evergreen topics can run the gamut. However more often than not these kinds of blog posts answer common questions or provide advice for solving a problem.

For Roundpeg, a blog post like “5 Good Email Habits” would be a good example of an evergreen blog post. The nature of email marketing isn’t something that is going to change anytime soon and business owners with email marketing programs will (or should!) always be interested in learning ways to improve. For your business, evergreen content might come in different forms. For a heating and cooling company, “Why is my Air Conditioner Not Working?” would be an evergreen topic because summer after summer many homeowners are going to turn on their AC unit for the first time since August or September, figure out something is wrong, freak out, and then turn to the web for an answer.

Try and think about an always relevant, frequently asked question you get from customers. It would probably make a great blog post. 

The advantage of evergreen topics is that if you can write one that builds enough traction and SEO value, it can serve as a tentpole page on your website. Month after month as people make similar searches that result in them finding your blog post, you’ll be introducing your business to a new crop of potential customers. You can take advantage of that by including additional resources, a contact form, or other strong call-to-actions on that page so that those finding it can take an appropriate next step to become a customer.

The other beauty of evergreen content (particularly seasonal evergreen topics) is that you should be able to easily forecast when people will be searching for this kind of information, add the topic to your content calendar for just before the appropriate time, and ensuring that once that time comes you have an extremely timely blog post published and ready to share, be found, and start a conversation with those that do.

Because the information will be timely year after year, once the post is published you don’t have to worry about it ever again. You might want to make small updates to the page over time to account for anything new or write a companion blog post to expand on the topic, but this core information won’t require significant change.

The one tricky part about evergreen content is that there is a good chance that this topic has been written about by many other websites already, meaning competition can be tough, and breaking your way into the tippy-top of Page 1 on Google will be a tall (if not impossible) task. The best way to help a blog post on a popular topic find its footing is to try and give it a niche angle or approach that some of the more established posts don’t do.

Current Events

Another approach to blog topics is to write blog posts covering current events that are relevant or impacting your business, your industry, or your customers. For inspiration, you don’t have to look much further than turning on your TV and watching the news or reading the latest issue of the industry publication you are already regularly reading. These types of blog posts are meant to be educational, explaining these recent events to your customers or prospects, how they will be affected by them, what it means for them, and how you can help them navigate the situation.

The biggest advantage of blogging about current events is that you obviously get to capitalize on the high volume of searches that are happening as a result of people wanting to learn more about or get a better understanding of the situation after they hear about it. Though you’ll no doubt have lots of competition in the form of others doing the same, if you are able to get out ahead of the topic and get something out there as soon as possible, your post can establish a ton of authority very quickly and become a huge draw to your website.

The obvious drawback to blogging about current events is that while you are likely to see a huge spike in interest and traffic generation from the blog post soon after the blog is published, in the days and weeks that follow that buzz will quickly die. This is because of the nature of the news cycle: here and gone, on to the next new thing. Once people learn about something and learn all there is to know about it there is no reason to return to it. Current event blog posts are never a solution for sustained traffic over a long period of time.

What is currently happening in the news that is/will be affecting your business, industry, or customers that you could blog about? 

An example of that would be this blog post from 2018 about the then-inescapable topic of the recent Facebook information breach. Obviously, at the time, this was huge news and very relevant to Roundpeg as a provider of social media services. This blog post was written to give people an understanding of the entire event, from breach to trial, and give them perspective on what these breaches meant for them and the prospect of social media marketing and advertising going forward. Cut to over three years later and no one cares anymore. Cambridge Analytica, information breaches, and even the great memes that came out of Mark Zuckerberg’s bizarre courtroom behavior are old news.

You saw this a lot over the course of the previous year as well. When the COVID-19 pandemic was officially declared, businesses across the globe were forced to send their employees home and conduct business remotely. At the time, very few employees were equipped to deal with their new work-from-home reality which caused you to certainly notice an influx of articles and blog posts about “Tips for Working From Home.” Well, cut to now over a year later and just about everyone is now 1000% comfortable (if not now preferable) to working from home. These articles, which probably gave people some great and super helpful advice for people panicking back in April 2020, are now pretty much irrelevant.

The best blog topics are the ones your readers care about

Ultimately, there is no formula or golden ratio for what kind of blog topics you need to write about. In a perfect world, your blog will feature a mixture of the two. After all, there isn’t always going to be something in the news worth talking about. But when there is, there isn’t a good reason not to talk about it, just don’t expect it to become a new long-term pillar of content. Evergreen blog topics can help you fill your content void in between the quiet news cycle months.

The best advice I can give when choosing blog topics, however, is simple: the best blog topics are the ones that your readers are going to care about the most! Don’t obsess too much about whether a topic is “good” or not. Instead, just ask yourself the simple question of “will my readers, customers, or potential customers find value in this topic?” If the answer is “yes,” then the time you spend writing will be well worth it.