Quality Content – 5 Ways To Gather Topics For Your Blog

Blog Marketing Suggestions – Content and SEO

Had the opportunity this week to attend an event for Blog Marketing 101 at Whitepages HQ here in Seattle. The event was led by Neil Patel who has been blogging for several years. Neil shared the information that helped his blogs reach higher levels.

This post covers some ideas for auto dealer marketing concepts, blog content and car dealer software that you can utilize on your dealer blog.

What Should I blog about?

Blogs are about building relationships, not about selling. Take a look at mint.com and notice the topics on their blog. These are topics that interest their primary target customer. Mint doesn’t use their blog to talk about how wonderful their products are, and neither should you.

Here’s How Car Dealer Blogs Become Influential Marketing Tools

1. RSS Feeds – Subscribe to the feeds of dealership blogs that are ran by others in your industry who you believe is doing a great job at writing and marketing a blog with high quality content.

2. Twitter – Read through some of the recent tweets of those you follow, find out what makes them compelling enough to click through and read. Analyze the quality of the content and see how well they are doing with their blog.

3. Comments – When you’re first starting out, blog comments might lack quality but most importantly they get you into the conversation on your blog. Don’t let anyone’s comment go un-noticed.

4. Magazines – Magazines are a great source for brainstorming topics, they usually have great stories in them so you can read through them and get ideas on how a post could be done on your blog like that. Auto dealer blogs could feature installation tips and other helpful topics.

5. Community – What is happening in your community? Perhaps there are topics that keep coming up that a good thorough blog post could satisfy. A good discussion can build your blog readership audience quickly.

What RSS feeds do I use? – Typically you can follow the RSS feeds easily, but this has more to do with researching your post. Try to post content on your dealer blog that is relevant today and perhaps a good discussion will happen on your blog.

For example, if you have a collection of RSS feeds that are difficult to maintain then start building small ones.

Twitter is about building a network comprised of people who share similar interests, and providing help to those you are connected to when they post something of interest. This is called a “Re-Tweet”.

Comments can be considered the gold standard in putting value onto blogs. The number of comments per post will help identify which topics are most popular, then additional articles can be developed based on what some of the comments reveal.

When you see a good magazine on the shelf, usually there’s something specific that catches your eye. It could be a good image, a good topic, or something that has peaked your interest lately. People react to familiar events so when someone sees an image or topic that seems interesting it’s likely related to their memory and/or imagination.

A strong community can make the biggest difference in your early blog success. Find the most popular commenters and keep them engaged in the site.

Conclusion -

It’s important to become resourceful.  By delivering powerful content your community will be more likely to comment.  Great content will attract links and more people will be willing to promote you if the content you’re producing is quality.  Think about what your visitors need the most, what will keep them coming back, and how you can be different than anything else currently on the market.  Do you have a tip on how to create a powerful blog post?  Share it in the comments!