We’ve all been there — staring at the screen, knowing we need to come up with a blog post, LinkedIn thread or an article, but the words aren’t flowing and the ideas aren’t coming.
I’m going to share with you one of the easiest ways to find blog post ideas that there is — Google’s ‘People also ask’ feature.
For this post I’m going to use Bookkeepers as an example, but this process can be used for pretty much any business I can think of.
Generating blog post ideas for Bookkeepers
First, go to Google and type in a simple word to do with your business. Let’s start with ‘bookkeepers’.
Ignore the Ad results at the top, forget about the local results and don’t bother with the people doing well at SEO. Scroll down until you see this section:
Immediately we can see 2 easy blog post titles:
- What does a bookkeeper do?
- What is the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant?
Let’s ignore the obviously job-related searches as they’re not relevant.
Expand the list
Clicking on the titles for the two questions above, the list expands a little, giving us some more options:
Now we can add these two to the list:
- Do all bookkeepers do payroll?
And
- Do bookkeepers pay bills?
Bookkeeping
Now let’s do the same with the word ‘bookkeeping’.
Remember: click on the interesting or relevant results to get more examples:
From this we now have:
- How do you do basic bookkeeping?
- What are the 2 types of bookkeeping?
- What are 10 things that bookkeepers do?
Relevant phrases
Let’s expand a little by thinking about things that a bookkeeper does; I’m going to use ‘small business accounts’ and ‘VAT returns’ as my next 2 examples.
Small business accounts
This gives us:
- What accounts do I need for a small business?
- Can you do your own small business accounting?
- Do you need a business account as a small trader?
Clicking on the first listing expands it out to:
So let’s add to the list:
- How do small businesses keep accounts?
- Do you need a business account as a small trader?
- What type of bank account is best for small business?
- How do I set up a small business account?
And finally:
VAT returns
Giving:
- How do I calculate my VAT return?
- What is the difference between a tax return and a VAT return?
- Can I do my VAT return myself?
Expanded out to:
- Do I need an accountant for VAT?
- What can I claim on my first VAT return?
- What happens if you don’t pay VAT?
Summary
By searching Google for 4 simple keywords and phrases, we have managed to generate 20 blog post ideas:
- What does a bookkeeper do?
- What is the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant?
- Do all bookkeepers do payroll?
- Do bookkeepers pay bills?
- How do you do basic bookkeeping?
- What are the 2 types of bookkeeping?
- What are 10 things that bookkeepers do?
- What accounts do I need for a small business?
- Can you do your own small business accounting?
- Do you need a business account as a small trader?
- How do small businesses keep accounts?
- Do you need a business account as a small trader?
- What type of bank account is best for small business?
- How do I set up a small business account?
- How do I calculate my VAT return?
- What is the difference between a tax return and a VAT return?
- Can I do my VAT return myself?
- Do I need an accountant for VAT?
- What can I claim on my first VAT return?
- What happens if you don’t pay VAT?
Play around with the titles (for example, I would make ‘What are 10 things that bookkeepers do?’ into ‘10 things your bookkeeper can do for you’) but remember, from an SEO point of view, these are the questions being asked so will do well as blog titles with well written blog posts.
If you want to use them for LinkedIn posts, use the question as the lead in to your post — a few line returns and then answer the question.
Hopefully that gives you something to be doing to generate blog post ideas for this week!
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Think that this kind of help could be good for your business content and blog posts? Book in a call and let’s have a chat about how I can help.
