Sooner rather than later, you will be planning your blog posts for 2022. The purpose of this post is to help you come up with blogging ideas that will bring more traffic to your website and result in more sales for your online business.
How Often to Plan Your Blog Posts
Before we get into our blogging ideas for 2022, let’s talk about how often you will be doing this exercise. How many blog posts a week are you going to be posting? How far ahead should you plan?
In 2021, I did a blogging blitz from January to the end of March. I posted once a day on my health and wellness blog. The results were amazing and my blitz is still paying off (even though I post only once a week now). In that case, I took a few hours to plan for the whole 3-month period. The reason I did this is that I wanted to make sure it happened. I knew it would be a bit stressful and hard to fit a new blog post 5 times a week. Having all my topics laid out gave me added confidence and motivation.
However, the less frequently I blog, the fewer blog posts I plan in advance. My goal until the end of November is to post 2-3 times a week on this blog so I plan one month in advance. On my fasting blog, with a blogging frequency of once a week, I don’t even plan at all. I think about it during the weekend and decide what I want to be writing about on Monday. You may love planning and checklists. If that’s you, you can plan 3 months in advance even if you post only once a week. Whatever helps you ensure you get it done.
How Often You Should Post
Now, that’s the million-dollar question. At the very least once a week if you want to maintain your Google rankings. As a new blogger, the more the better. Growing your blog traffic takes time and a lot of content creation. The more frequently you post on your blog, the better you will get at it. When I started blogging, writing 600 words would take hours. Granted, my blog topics required a lot of research, but still, now I write double the number of words in half the time.
If it takes you about 4 hours to write one post and you have 15 hours a week to work on your blog. Why not plan 3-4 posts a week? Some weeks you may find you can post more often than others as you may find that small administrative tasks add up and one week you decide to deal with them. Some weeks you may decide you can devote more time to your business too. I like to keep my posting schedule pretty fluid (unless it’s five days a week posting schedule, then I want to make sure I don’t think about it and get it done).
Try a posting schedule for one month and see how much readjusting it needs. When you decide how often to post, you need to take into consideration how long it takes you on average to write your content but in the end, if you want to be productive, you need to stick to your goals.
Trading the Time Economy for the Value Economy
The beauty of your blogging career is that it doesn’t matter to anyone how long it took you to write a blog post. What matters to your readers is the value they get from reading your content. When your blog is established and you are more proficient at writing, you will have the potential of earning a full-time income while working only 4-5 hours a day!
However, as a beginner, you may find that writing a post alone takes you 4 hours and you are not even making any money yet. You will need to stop thinking in terms of hours and learn to think in terms of tasks. What tasks do you need to do each week? Make a list. Of course, you need to have an idea of how long it will take you to accomplish those tasks, but give yourself less time than you think. As a new blogger, you are not aiming for perfection. It’s definitely quantity over quality. It doesn’t mean you should produce junk, of course. Rather, you can’t afford to obsess over small meaningless details like layout, photos, or perfect grammar. You will make mistakes and that’s OK. You will be updating your posts that bring traffic to your blog and improving them later, OK?
Blogging Ideas for 2022
Now you know how many blogging ideas you need to plan for 2022. How are you going to find your ideas? What should you be blogging about?
Keyword Research
Keyword research is my number one strategy to find blogging ideas. If you want to make money with your blog, you should know what you are selling and what problems your product solves. That gives you an insight into the questions people who need your product are asking in your niche.
I have four favorite ways to find keywords for blog topics: Google, Pinterest, my competitors, and my own blog.
Search engines like Google bring your site the best kind of traffic. Pinterest is good too, but I find that my visitors from Pinterest are not as engaged. They will spend less time on my site and are less likely to buy.
How to Find Blogging Ideas Using Google
Here’s how I find blogging ideas with Google:
- I use chrome extensions like Keywords Everywhere and Ubersuggest to make a list of related keywords when I enter my own keyword ideas in the search bar.
- I look at the related queries provided by Google.
- Google Trend is another excellent source for related queries. Enter your keyword ideas and download the Related Queries file. Furthermore, the Related Topics may serve as a starting point for other keywords.
How to Find Blogging Ideas Using Pinterest
Use your keywords and related keywords for even more topic ideas. When you search your keywords on Pinterest, check the results. These are blogging ideas you can use in the future. Also, Pinterest provides more long-tail keywords examples. Enter a fairly broad keyword in your niche (like for my niche I enter fasting or intermittent fasting). You will see the search bar autopopulate some related keywords.
Your Competitors
Your competitors will provide you with much-needed information. Find well-established sites in your niche as you research keywords using Google and Pinterest. Need more guidance to research your competitors? Read How to Start a Niche Site That Can Actually Make a Full-Time Income. I give you a step-by-step demonstration of how you can search for competitors.
Moreover, don’t forget to sign up for my NIche Site Workshop for further guidance.
The bottom line is that you will check for the websites that come up when you type in your keywords in the search bar. You need to look for sites that are not huge (I try to find sites that have between 10,000 and 50,000 organic visitors per month) and that offer products and services similar to what you would like to offer.
Your Blog
After about 3 months of publishing content, you will know which blog posts are ranking better on Google and which posts are bringing some traffic to your site. Look at your Analytics and use Ubersuggest to see which keywords you are ranking for. Produce more content using related keywords. It’s that simple!
In Summary
Planning your blog content should mostly revolve around finding keywords that will help you get the kind of blog traffic you need to sell your products or services. Of course, you can write some blog posts that are more personal and maybe share a bit about your experience to connect with your audience. However, the main goal is to help your readers solve a specific problem. And the problems you solve with your blog posts should be the same problems that your lead magnet solves (in a more in-depth manner) and, ultimately, your paid product.
