Finding blog ideas and syndication

[Jseddon92]

We've had our blog for a little under 2 years now using Magento and we've only created 48 posts. As we're in the furniture industry topics are hard to come by and we've become stuck for ideas. Sure we have researched our audience, checked Q&A's and forums to analyse what questions our audience are asking, but the ideas are limited. It's a difficult industry to find niche articles that our audience would be interested in. Could anyone suggest any ideas on how we could find interesting topics that people would actually want to share and maybe our industry influencers would be interested in featuring on their sites, does syndication still work? Duplicate content is a big 'NO NO' for Google but as long as the third party site features a rel=canonical or link back to our original post, Google wouldn't have any problem with this?

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Joshua. Sometimes it's all about finding something outside of the box when it comes to being able to create content on a regular basis. Tom Dickson probably didn't find his idea for Will it Blend? in the forums or common Q&As, still he tapped into a model that let him regularly demonstrate and solidify his brand.  It also doesn't have to be solely tied to your site. If you have something that people enjoy your brand name often becomes part of the search. Just a few ideas: which couch does the dog prefer? Which couch does the cat prefer? Which lounge chair wore the throw pillow better? Etc. Cheers!

[LinkWheelOldSchool]

I've done some marketing for the a few furniture sites (manufacturers and retailers) and the best kind of posts that work best (great engagement and lots of views) are lists like : 10 living room ideas, 15 kitchen designs for increased usability, 20 bedroom office designs for small spaces, etc. You don't need a lot of text for this, just images (which you can use with attribution rights). Check houzz.com for more details.

[TomRayner]

What about looking for the questions that people are asking about your industry, products or niche?

Try http://answerthepublic.com/ - just enter the keyword you want and which Google to crawl and it will find a list of questions that people are actively searching for (appearing in similar searches/autocomplete).

Could open up a couple of content ideas.

[RyanPurkey]

Thumbs up to Tom's suggestion. That reminds me that you can also run searches in Google on Yahoo Question's repository, so something like: furniture site:answers.yahoo.com or get more specific inserting wildcards like: *** furniture * site:answers.yahoo.com**  Cheers!

[Jseddon92]

I've never come across this site but there are some excellent topics here that we could utilise. It does hurt the neck a little through!! Much appreciated.

[TheWebMastercom]

OK, what is your goal for the different articles? i.e. social sharing, ranking for particular keywords, attracting links, or something else?

Once you know the goal of particular articles you can think about how to write them to achieve those goals (noting you may want to do all the goals suggested above, just focus on one goal per article).

So lets go through some suggested titles:

Social sharing:  10 Pieces of Furniture you couldn't do without.  No. 7 will blow your mind!

Keyword ranking (more natural traffic)  - How to clean red wine off your settee.

Links - More detailed articles that go in more depth than the other articles, often helpful but could involve ideas from the other articles so something like - "How to know you are paying the right price for your furniture"

Whatever you do when ranking for keywords, is check out the competition and make sure your article is better, so looks nice, contains better information, and is more helpful.  For more ideas, just check out what your competition is writing about, and take some ideas and just make the articles 10 times better bringing in more \ different concepts and information so it is totally original.