4 Tools to Kickstart Your Blog

Blogging is irrationally terrifying. It’s tough to put your ideas down on paper, publish them and allow the world to evaluate and comment in an anonymous forum. It can leave you feeling exposed and vulnerable.

Like anything new, it’s uncomfortable at first but gets less difficult with time and practice. It’s easy to let the fear of blogging stop you by labeling it as difficult, trivial, or even self serving, but the reality is, you need to do it and here’s why.

Search engines have nothing but the information on the internet to determine if your business is reputable and relevant. That’s why consistently putting fresh content about topics relevant to your business and your audience is so important. You’re giving search engines indicators that your business is relevant to the topics you are discussing. The more relevant information you’re putting out there, the more likely people interested in those topics will find you. And while Google’s search algorithm uses hundreds of “ranking signals”, one of the most powerful is putting out fresh, new content.

Basically, if you’re not putting out content, you’re missing golden opportunities.

Blogging boosts SEO and SEO is essential for bringing in new leads. Check out our SEO Guide for Fitness Businesses.

That said, once the fear subsides, finding inspiration is often the next sticking point. Here are 4 tools to help get those creative juices flowing so that you can blog more consistently on relevant topics.

Answer the Public

This is hands down my favorite tool. Type in any topic and Answer the Public will serve up a visualization of popular searches that contain that keyword, using the auto suggest searches that Google and Bing provide.

Google Trends

Trends aggregates all search queries on a particular topic and gives you tools to unpack those results a bit with a timeline of interest in the topic and geography information. It also give you related topics that may be of interest to you and the ability to compare two different topics.

HubSpot Blog Topic Generator

I’m not sure what engine is powering this generator, and the results don’t always impress, but sometimes you find gold. I’d also checkout this awesome blog post template kit they’ve put together.

This is a much more entertaining version of the HubSpot Generator. Because of their creativity, it may take a few refreshes to find something useable, but its suggestions will definitely help get you out of any rut you may have been in.

So you know the “why” you should be blogging and you’ve got the tools to help you do so. Now, it’s up to you to get writing, start bringing in more prospects, and grow your business.

Interested in learning more about how you can optimize your website on your own? Get your free copy of our SEO Guide for Fitness Businesses!