1. Understand your audience.

Before you start writing your blog post, make sure you have a clear understanding of your target audience.

To do so, take the following steps:

• Ask yourself exploratory questions. Who are they? Are they like me, or do I know someone like them? What do they want to know about? What will resonate with them? You should also think about your audience's age, background, goals, and challenges at this stage.
• Carry out market research. Use market research tools to begin uncovering or confirming more specific information about your audience. For instance, if you wanted to create a blog about work-from-home hacks, you can make the reasonable assumption that your audience will be mostly Gen Zers and Millennials. But it’s important to confirm this through research.
• Create formal buyer personas. "Buyer personas can be a handy way to keep a human in mind while you’re writing. Coordinate your personas with your marketing and sales teams. Chances are that your existing customers are exactly the kind of people you want to attract with your writing in the first place,” says Curtis del Principe, senior marketing manager at HubSpot.

I’ll share a little more on buyer personas with an example (because they’re that important).

Let’s say your readers are Millennials looking to start a business. You probably don't need to provide them with information about getting started on social media — most of them already have that down.

You might, however, want to give them information about how to adjust their social media approach (e.g., — from casual to more business-savvy). That kind of tweak is what helps you publish content about the topics your audience really wants and needs.

Don't have buyer personas in place for your business? Here are a few resources to help you get started:

• Create Buyer Personas for Your Business [Free Template]
• Guide: How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business
• [Free Tool] Make My Persona: Buyer Persona Generator

2. Check out your competition.

What better way to draw inspiration than to look at your well-established competition?

It’s worth taking a look at popular, highly reviewed blogs because their strategy and execution is what got them to grow in credibility.

The purpose of doing this isn’t to copy these elements, but to gain better insight into what readers appreciate in a quality blog.

When you find a competitor’s blog, take the following steps:

• Determine whether they’re actually a direct competitor. A blog’s audience, niche, and specific slant determine whether they're actually your competitor. But the most important of these is their audience. If they serve a completely different public than you, then they’re likely not a competitor.
• Look at the blog’s branding, color palette, and theme. Colors and themes play a huge role in whether you seem like part of a niche. For example, a blog about eco-friendly products should likely use earthy tones instead of loud, unnatural colors.
• Analyze the tone and writing style of the competition. Take note of your competition’s copywriting. Is it something you feel like you can successfully emulate? Does it ring true to the type of blog you’d like to create? What do readers most respond to? Be aware of what you can feasibly execute.

3. Determine what topics you’ll cover.

Before you write anything, pick a topic you’d like to write about. The topic can be pretty general to start as you find your desired niche in blogging.

Here are some ways to choose topics to cover:

• Find out which topics your competitors often cover. After you determine your competitors, go through their archive and category pages, and try to find out which topics they most often publish content about. From there, you can create a tentative list to explore further.
• Choose topics you understand well. You want to ensure you know the topic well enough to write authoritatively about it. Think about those that come most naturally to you. What has your professional experience been like so far? What are your hobbies? What did you study in college? These can all give rise to potential topics to cover.
• Ensure the topics are relevant to your readership. Del Principe suggests checking in with sales and service teams as well. "What kinds of things do they wish customers already knew? What kinds of questions do they get asked a thousand times?” If you’re not serving their needs, then you’d be shouting into a void — or, worse, attracting the wrong readership.
• Do preliminary keyword research. Search for topics using a keyword research tool, then determine whether there is search demand. If you found the perfect topics that are the perfect cross between your expertise and your reader’s needs, you’ve struck gold — but the gold will have no value unless people are searching for those terms.

Pro tip: If you need help brainstorming ideas or lack inspiration, you can use HubSpot’s blog topic generator. It can generate title ideas and even outlines based on a brief description of what you want to write about or a specific keyword.