Cannabis business blogging can truly be migraine-inducing for many business owners. In order to gain the results you want, you need to be consistent – something not all that easy when you’re all out of topic ideas. Here’s your five-step guide to creating an endless stream of cannabis business blog post ideas.
Coming up with cannabis business blog post ideas is one of the most trying tasks that only continues to grow more difficult as your content library expands.
Usually, when you’re writing the first few blog posts for your cannabis business, you’re full of fresh and creative topic ideas. After a while, though, the obvious and basic topics are being utilized. It feels as though you’ve written every possible thing there is to write for cannabis consumers.
Continued content creation and topic brainstorming become more difficult as time goes on.
But, you want a cannabis business blog that produces at least 11 posts each month.
A frequently updated business blog shows cannabis consumers that your brand is a credible industry resource that could solve their problems. Plus, consistent content creation drives organic SEO in a big way.
Writing the actual blog post is one thing. But, you can’t even begin to write a cannabis business blog post without having a clear topic idea in mind. While blog content creation can be difficult in the cannabis industry, it’s really just the blinking cursor on the blank page and the lack of free-flowing ideas that make cannabis business owners like yourself feel stuck and confused on how to proceed.
This is why so many cannabis businesses are hiring content marketing professionals to help maintain the content creation, allowing the business owner to focus on other important brand operations.
This brings us to the main point: As I continue to work with new clients, I spend a lot of time developing months of cannabis industry blog post ideas for my clients. Here’s how I go about it.
Create Never-Ending Cannabis Business Blog Post Topics
You’ll never find an empty editorial calendar to be a formidable opponent again with these tips on how to create a continuous stream of cannabis business blog post topics.
You’ll never be intimidated by an empty editorial calendar again with all these ways to come up with blog content ideas.
Want to just dive right into the cannabis blog post topics? Here are 54 creative blog posts for cannabis businesses to help you get started.
Step 1: Create a Cannabis Business Content Marketing Strategy
Before you can jump into the content topic creation for your cannabis business blog, you need to understand where these blog post ideas are coming from. The best blog post ideas are born from a data-backed content marketing strategy.
An effective cannabis content marketing strategy provides the answers to the following questions in five salient segments:
- Audience: Who are your cannabis business customers and what do they already know?
- Content: What type of content does your cannabis brand need to produce to engage your target consumers?
- Distribution: On what channels/platforms should your cannabis business distribute content so target consumers will find it?
- Strategy: What content marketing tasks should you do, how often, and at what starting point?
- Measurement: How do you measure the performance of your cannabis blog content? How do you know your content is effective?
Blog content is a natural element of the cannabis business content marketing strategy. As you build up your list of blog post topics, keep referring back to this resource – your source of information for all things cannabis content marketing – and ensure they are cohesive. Otherwise, what is the purpose of your business blog?
If you’re producing frequent and consistent blog posts on topics that are of interest to an audience other than your target customers, any website traffic you gain will be lacking impact on your business.
NOTE: Basically, you shouldn’t be doing the content marketing AND running the business! Outsource your content to an experienced cannabis content marketing professional.
Step 2: Provide Solutions to Cannabis Consumers
Ultimately, cannabis consumers reading industry blogs are looking for quality, solid, and applicable information that solves their problems and gives them insight on what to do. But, don’t think too hard about it. Just provide in-depth answers to a wide range of questions about cannabis and the cannabis industry, one at a time. Google (and your browsers-turned-customers) will reward you.
Determine: What pain points or problems do you solve for your target cannabis consumer audience? What questions do potential customers have about your cannabis business?
After that, it’s easy: Answer those questions. It doesn’t matter if it’s a basic, simple question that you can answer even in a cannabis-induced sleep. Answering basic questions won’t adversely affect your industry reputation. In fact, it will benefit your brand. If you provide a detailed, quality answer to all potential questions you may receive from browsers or customers, your cannabis business blog audience (and potential customers) will start to develop trust in your brand. In the end, this leads to your business remaining at the forefront of the consumers’ minds as they start to think about purchasing from you.
Start with foundational content topics that relate to your cannabis business, making it crystal-clear to your audience and search engines.
For instance, I’m a cannabis industry content marketer with strategy, SEO content creation, social media marketing, and more. From as expansive as “The Big List of Cannabis Business Marketing Ideas” on down to more specific topics like “7 Things Your Dispensary Website is Missing”
Other cannabis business blog post topics will build off the foundational content pillars you start out with. Many of these topics will overlap, and that’s perfectly okay. There are numerous ways to ask and respond to the same question – get into detail about them all.
Step 3: Conduct Keyword Research for Cannabis Industry SEO Content
Before you can begin creating the actual content, now that you have the foundational blog topics laid out as your content pillars, you need to do some keyword research to gain insight into how cannabis consumers are browsing for that topic on Google.
I use Keysearch, Keyword Surfer, and SEOStack Keyword Tool to discover what cannabis consumers are searching for online and at what volume. Try typing in a few versions of a specific blog post topic and see what comes up. Keyword research tools like these will return search volume and provide long-tail search suggestions within the results, better enabling you to understand the search intent of the blog post topic, so that you can then come up with content that aligns with that intent.
Other helpful tools for identifying used search terms, volume, and competition that can inform and support specific cannabis business blog post ideas, such as Google Keyword Planner.
Step 4: Fill in Your Editorial Calendar with the Blog Post Ideas
For most busy cannabis business owners, it’s incredibly helpful to schedule your blog post topics in batches that fit into a quarter of the year.
In December, schedule cannabis blog post topics for January through the end of June. Depending on how often your website is publishing blog content, you can develop six, twelve, eighteen, or even more blog post topics. Two blog posts per week is an excellent place to start, keeping in mind that the more you post, the better your business’ marketing efforts will pay off. Next, in June, schedule the cannabis blog post topics for July through December. And continue on like that. (You don’t have to start in these months. It can be any time of year.)
Once you have a full list of cannabis business blog post ideas, schedule them into your calendar. Be sure to include any interviews or research you must do ahead of the planned publishing date as well.
Now, you don’t have to strain your brain any further stressing over your business blog post ideas for the next six months – until you have to write other things, that is.
Step 5: Track Content KPIs
Simply put, content marketing is brand messaging comprised of blog posts, case studies, infographics, eBooks, social media content, videos, podcasts, and white papers.
The question is: How should cannabis business owners measure the success of their content marketing to gauge growth and engagement.
There are numerous ways to track performance. Here are some of the main key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the success of your content marketing efforts.
- Unique page visits
- Downloads
- Time on Page
- Email Newsletter Subscriptions
- Inbound links
- Social shares
- Comments and engagement
- Cost-per-click (CPC)
- Customer acquisition
- Conversions
- Social media followers
- Brand growth
Do remember that content significantly impacts your cannabis business’ bottom line. Make it a standard practice to use the above key performance indicators to measure revenue and the brand growth that results from your cannabis business blog posts.
Tracking your KPIs once a month is an effective method to start with. After you’re three months into your content production, roughly every quarter, delve further. What do the website traffic trends look like for your site and content? Are there any immediate first-page keyword opportunities you can leverage? Have your cannabis business objectives changed?
The way you answer those questions may result in you having to change up a few planned out cannabis business blog post ideas – or inform your audience in the next batch of content you create.
Utilizing the List of Cannabis Business Blog Post Ideas
Creating an endless flow of cannabis business blog post ideas can feel overwhelming, especially for the busy cannabis business owners trying to do everything themselves. Don’t stress over having “perfect” blog post ideas.
If they relate to your cannabis business, correlate to your content marketing strategy, and are based on keyword research for SEO content creation, you will be off to a grand start. It will be even better if you can schedule your cannabis business blog post ideas for six months out. That way, you don’t have to worry about topic creation for half a year.
Follow these steps to get your creativity flowing again and to have you take your audience’s interests into consideration before you even start typing.
How do you come up with ideas for your cannabis business blog posts? Share your own step-by-step method in the comments.