Why You Should Change Up Your Blog Topics Every Once In Awhile

Think about all the popular niche magazines out there. They may focus on one topic like fitness, cooking or home decor, but they almost always include articles that don’t quite fit into their main focus. A fitness magazine might include a piece on fashion and a cooking magazine might include house cleaning tips, for example.

Why should that be important to you as a content marketer? To create a long-term, popular and sustainable content machine, you have to get used to the idea of producing a variety of content that’s not necessarily directly related to what your business offers. You can’t write the same article on the same topic for years and expect to keep people’s interest (or your own). Read on to learn how to add variety to your content without losing your content identity.

One-Dimensional Content is Limiting

Writing about the same or similar topics over and over again doesn’t really make a lot of sense. You’re not one-dimensional and neither are your readers. To create a content hub that really brings people back year after year, your topics need to be diverse, just like your audience’s interests. You can do this yourself, or by enlisting the help of website content writing services.

Take Inc.com for example. According to their meta description, the magazine includes “advice, tools, and services that help your small business grow.” And yet a quick search of their site finds articles with titles like “7 Incredible Things That Happen Once You Learn To Enjoy Being Alone,” “I Tried The New Sous Vide Egg Bites At Starbucks And, Well, Ah. Or, Rather, Oh,” and “Answer This One Simple Question To Find Out Exactly How Happy You Are.”

What that tells you about Inc.com is that they understand that not only do their readers want to know how to grow a business, but they’re also interested in self-improvement (and the latest Starbucks menu additions).

This is an example of how a brand can use submitted content to maintain variety, but you can accomplish something similar with content you write on your own site or guest posts you produce. If you want to gain lasting popularity, don’t be afraid to take a well-rounded content approach. People read for enjoyment and knowledge, and it’s possible to give them both through your writing.

Branching Outside of your Niche Topic is More Sustainable

Here’s a quick quiz. What do you suppose happens when you do the same workout, whether it’s cardio or strength, day after day with no variation? At first you may get stronger, but over time, the workout that once challenged you will become easy and you’ll stop seeing the results you saw at first. This is because people are very good at adapting to new physical challenges.

Now think about that as it applies to your writing. If you only write about the one topic year after year, you’ll eventually run out of novel and interesting things to say. You might even burn out from so little variety. Writing about one topic is only sustainable for so long.

To keep yourself and your audience interested, it’s necessary to color outside the lines occasionally and tap into one of the other many areas you probably find interesting. If you can’t find the time to create this new content yourself, online content writing services can help.

Writing About Multiple Topics for a Wider Audience

Taylor Swift, the country music artist turned pop sensation, is one of the most successful musicians currently performing. Though Swift had plenty of talent on her side, she didn’t get to where she is by sticking to a niche. Though her earlier songs can all be classified as country music, most of her newer and most popular songs have a much more mainstream pop sound.

Taylor Swift has such a large following, in part, because she branched out beyond the country music style that first helped her become famous and performed music that appealed to a wider audience.

You can apply a similar strategy to your content marketing. No, you don’t have to sell out, but you can create content that appeals to multiple groups and end up creating loyal fans. The more people you can get your content in front of, the more possibilities there are for making connections with people that could later turn into customers.

Tips for Finding Your Non-Niche

If you’ve been feeling a little resigned to the task of writing about one topic for the rest of your working life, you’re probably feeling a little excited at this point to find that there’s another way to go about creating content. As you start to consider your possibilities, here are some tactics and tips that can help guide your content strategy:

• Don’t go too far astray: When you’re increasing the variety of your blog posts and articles, remember not to deviate too far from your area of expertise. There’s a reason that marketing experts will tell you to find a niche and remain consistent with it. If you write about anything and everything and don’t appear to specialize in one particular area, your blog and writing presence will look unfocused and haphazard.

• Don’t forget your original identity: When trying to reach new audiences, don’t forget the people that you originally started writing for. They’ll appreciate the variety of your new posts, but if you go too far in another direction, you may lose their interest or appear as though you’re oblivious to their concerns and needs.

• Write what people want to read: Part of the point of stretching yourself when it comes to new topics is to gain popularity and gain new readers that you might not have been able to reach otherwise. Do some reverse engineering for this tip and find other blog posts that are doing well, then write something on a similar topic or in a similar format. If you use Buffer to share both your own content and content from other sources, you can see how well those outside posts are doing inside your Buffer dashboard.

• Write on a different platform: Don’t feel comfortable going too far from your core topics on your blog? Sometimes a change of scenery might be what you need. Medium is one example of a blogging platform that you can manage in addition to a main site blog. If you like to keep things organized, create a Medium account that deals with non-niche topics and keep your blog about your core subjects.

• Develop relationships with a few other sites: Amp up the power of your content and its ability to hit home with a new reader group by guest posting on other popular websites. Not only will the new topics you’re covering interest new readers, but the act of guest posting will put you in front of an entirely new audience.

• Enlist other authors: If you don’t have the bandwidth or ability to commit to writing about other topics on your blog, achieve variety with guest posts and posts written by other members of your team, individuals from a different department within your company, or writers from SEO-friendly content writing services. Your readers will appreciate seeing a different perspective.

Doing something new is good for you, for the popularity of your content, and ultimately for the sustainability of your content marketing efforts. While still holding true to your core topics and area of expertise, find new and complementary things you can write about that will interest your existing readers and expand your reach to new audience members.