The WMF Archives

By Angela Atkinson

Blogging is an increasingly popular form of self-expression among writers (and even "non" writers) these days. In March of 2010, there were reportedly more than 50 million blogs in the blogosphere, with more than 175 new ones being created every day. Clearly, the competition is stiff, so getting people to read your blog can be a bit of a challenge before you're well-established in the blogging community.

One major step to getting and keeping readers is to regularly publish high quality content. This can be easy when you first start a blog--you've got so much to say. But once you've been blogging awhile, you may find yourself running out of blog post ideas, especially if you're a niche blogger.

One way that you can keep yourself on track with your blog posts and generate new ideas at the same time is to use weekly SEO planning strategies to your advantage. The benefit is two-fold.

First, planning your SEO keywords for your posts ahead of time takes the pressure off. You won't have to come up with a blog post topic at the last second. Plus, using SEO keywords will help to optimize your blog's page ranking, thus increasing your traffic.

Planning SEO Keywords

Using free tools like Google Calendar and Wordtracker's free keyword suggestion tool, any blogger can plan her way to success. Plan your SEO keywords for a week (or month, depending on how often you post) ahead of time.

Create an event on your calendar for each blog post you plan to write during that time period. When you choose your keywords and key phrases for that day's post, enter them into the event's description field. If you use Google Calendar or a similar tool, you can create a recurring event, and then just edit the description of each event individually. This saves a lot of time.

Other tools, such as Microsoft Outlook's calendar, will also let you edit recurring events individually, but be sure to sync with your online calendar in case you're ever blogging on the run--or in case of a hard drive meltdown.

Using SEO Planning to Generate Blog Post Ideas

Using an SEO keyword suggestion tool, you can type in general terms that are related to your main blog topic to see what kinds of things are being searched on that topic. Then, scroll down the list and you'll see a wide variety of different key phrases--AKA new topic ideas. Even if you don't use the key phrases that are suggested, you'll often find a word or phrase that sparks an idea that turns into a new post topic.

For example, if you were a mommy blogger and typed in the words "boys vs girls," you'd get such phrases as "boys vs girls in sports" and "boys vs girls in the classroom." Sounds like the beginning of a series of posts, don't you think?

Bottom Line

If you run out of blog post ideas, planning your SEO keywords in advance is an easy way to generate blog post ideas, stay on track with your posting schedule and actively use relevant SEO keywords and key phrases--all of which lend to improved page ranking and traffic. And, using free tools like Google Calendar and Wordtracker, you'll actually save time (and money) in the process.



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SEO Planning: A New Way to Generate Blog Post Ideas