How HubSpot's Blog Team Comes Up With High-Performing Post Ideas
When I used to work at a marketing agency, I would read expert industry blogs, such as HubSpot, Marketing Brew, and Backlinko (to name a few).
One of my main questions every day was, “How do these brands do it? How do they constantly come up with brilliant blog ideas?”
Now, obviously, I work at HubSpot and I know what a blog strategy looks like at a big company with a recognizable brand.
By taking the time to do solid research and idea brainstorming, you can come up with blog topics that drive thousands of readers, like me, in — while boosting traffic, authority, and credibility.
Today, I want to pull the curtain back for you. We’ll discuss how the HubSpot blog continuously comes up with high-performing blog ideas.
How the HubSpot Blog Comes Up With Ideas
Before we get started, it’s important to know that when the HubSpot team comes up with blog ideas, several teams are involved (SEO, blog, and lead generation). Because of this, we divide our brainstorming process into two parts: trend research and SEO topic research. We then combine these efforts in our Insights Report on a quarterly basis (which you can download a copy of below).
Featured Resource: Search Insights Report Template
Let’s dive into both those processes below.
How the HubSpot Blog Generates Trend-Responsive Blog Post Ideas
Blog topics that relate to trends, research, or thought leadership yield bursts in non-organic traffic that can help you gain visitors while you’re waiting for SEO-driven posts to rank. Because they often include data, quotes, or other exclusive information, these posts can also earrn backlinks, which indirectly boost your search authority.
However, finding trendy non-organic post topics isn’t always straightforward and often requires brainstorming.
Pamela Bump, HubSpot’s Audience Growth Manager, leads the charge with our team’s brainstorming efforts while also managing the blog’s non-organic content strategy.
She says, “While our SEO team uses specialized tools to identify blog posts that will pull in organic traffic, I leverage a number of trend research tactics to identify post ideas that will pull in non-organic traffic from sources like email, social media, and referrals.”
Below is the process she asks bloggers to use during our virtual idea brainstorms.
1. Focus on your blog categories.
Before you get started, it’s important to have some sort of road map in mind. Choose the most important clusters, or blog categories, that you want to focus on for the quarter and develop ideas around them.
Immediately, just knowing the clusters you want to focus on could spark a few ideas for thought-leadership or data-driven research posts.
Each quarter, the HubSpot acquisition team chooses seven to ten clusters for each blog property — for us, that’s marketing, sales, service, and website. Usually the clusters relate to things like business goals or industry trends.
Additionally, we include other categories besides those clusters, such as Audience Growth, Lead Acquisition, and User Acquisition to help us …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
