When it comes to your niche business blog, it can be difficult to consistently come up with new and interesting blog topics. It can prove even more difficult to attract the kind of readership and traffic that you’re looking for.
The truth is there is no secret trick that will suddenly make your business blog appeal to the masses. And that’s okay! You’re not marketing yourself to everyone. However, there are ways that you can gradually grow your readership, expand your reach, and create a more loyal following. It just requires a bit of creative thinking.
If your well of blog ideas has all but run dry, start pulling ideas from other places! Marrying your niche blog posts to seemingly unrelated topics can help you reach a wider audience and create more interesting content.
If this sounds counterintuitive, bear with me and keep reading.
Marrying Two Unrelated Topics
We all know of a couple where the two people are totally different from one another. He’s a quiet, nerdy type. She’s a fun, bubbly extrovert. They couldn’t seem more opposite, but they work great together and enrich one another’s stories in ways someone just like them could not.
Think of your niche blog as that quiet, nerdy guy. While he’s an interesting fellow with a unique perspective to share with the world, he’s not so good at branching out from his immediate friend circle. The extrovert helps him make more friends—friends he probably never would have met otherwise—and he has a whole lot more fun with her in his life.
So, maybe it’s time to hitch your niche blog to a topic that’s a little more fun and outgoing. The trick is to find timely, unique, and innovative ways to tie two seemingly unconnected topics together. This can be both liberating and overwhelming. Suddenly, your list of options for blog topics got a whole lot longer.
Look to the latest trends and viral media, current news events, or relevant industries to see if there is anything that can relate back to your niche. As long as you can make a logical connection between the two, the reader will follow you wherever you go.
We do it on our own blog all the time. Let’s take a look at a few examples to get your creative juices flowing:
Lesson from the Colorado Caucus Cluster: Productivity Tools Could Save Democracy
In this post, Grace took her frustrating experience at the recent Colorado Caucus and tied it to the topic of productivity tools, how abundant they are, and how they can make nearly every aspect of our lives—from blogging to the democratic process—easier to manage and more productive. By marrying these two very different topics, she was able to reach a wider audience— people who were interested in the current presidential election and people interested in productivity tools that make their lives easier.
Developing a Solid Content Strategy, As Told by Buzzfeed’s “Tasty”
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere, you’ve probably seen one of Buzzfeed’s “Tasty” videos. Kali took this hot, new video trend and tied it into our niche: business blogging. She used Tasty’s approach to content to talk about the lessons business bloggers can learn about their own content strategies.
3 Lessons from “The X-Files” to Make Your Business Blog Better
After more than a decade off the air, the reboot of X-Files was a pretty big deal. It was a topic of much discussion amongst long-time fans, skeptics, and newcomers alike. Grace took the opportunity to jump on a trending topic and found an impressively creative way to tie it all back to business blogging.
Expand Your Audience
If you’re only ever writing about the same recycled topics on your blog, chances are your readership has fallen pretty flat. Even if you aren’t boring your current readers to tears, you probably aren’t tapping into new segments of your audience.
By tying two separate topics together you can immediately expand your reach, thereby growing your audience. Not only will you attract your usual readers, but you’ll also draw in readers who might be interested in the other topic of the post.
Consider the Tasty example above. By marrying the topics of content strategy and Buzzfeed’s super-shareable cooking videos, we were able to expand our usual audience to include foodies who may also be interested content marketing. At the very least, we delivered our regular readers something totally unique and probably more interesting than a generic post about content strategy.
Create a More Loyal Following
Variety is the spice of life, and it should be a primary ingredient in your blog. After all, your readers don’t want to read versions of the same blogs over and over again, especially if they’re no longer gaining anything from them.
The key to creating a loyal blog following (even if it’s a small one) is to consistently create content that is engaging, relevant, and useful, and that means mixing up the topics of your posts. By marrying two topics together, you’ll not only be able to deliver a wider variety of content, but you’ll also impress your readers with your creativity and stand out from other blogs in your niche. And ultimately, that’s what will keep them coming back.
It’s a win-win for you and your readers!
Get More Backlinks
Backlinks are an important part of SEO, but getting great backlinks to your website and the content you publish can be tough. By exploring topics other than those directly related to your niche, you’re not only reaching more readers, you’re also reaching other bloggers and websites that may have never found you otherwise.
By marrying two topics together, you’ll create more opportunities for backlinks to your blog content, which can pay dividends in SEO ranking.
As a niche business owner, you’ve got your work cut out for you when it comes to growing your blog readership and expanding your web presence. Instead of feeling restricted by your niche, draw inspiration from the world around you! There are so many things happening right now that matter to your audience. With the right approach, you can tie those topics to your own blog posts to create more value for more readers.
