Don’t let writers come up with blog topics

Did I just piss someone off? Hear me out.

I think as a writer, as a marketer, and as a business owner — in no particular order, several times a day, every day.

As a writer, I want to be creative, witty, eloquent — and appreciated for that.

As a marketer, I want things to be effective, logical, and sustainable.

As a business owner, I want the best ROI and revenue growth.

When you let your writers come up with topics for your blog all the time, all three of those personas suffer.

Here’s why you shouldn’t let your writers define your content strategy, and what to do instead.

Your writers pick topics they love

…while you need topics that work.

These are not always the same topics.

Writers naturally gravitate towards stuff they are comfortable writing about.

That’s not necessarily because your writers are bad — they just want to showcase their skills and put their best foot forward!

Fear of failure is a major factor at play.

When presented with a choice while doing something they will be judged for, people do something they’re comfortable with.

This results in a bunch of Star Wars and Harry Potter-themed posts on business blogs that repeat from Christmas to Valentine’s Day to Mother’s Day & Thanksgiving, and back to Christmas.

The kind of fail-safe everyone-does-them blog posts that most probably don’t have any effect on traffic, sales, branding, or publicity.

What you need instead is a thoroughly researched content plan that is made to pursue your business goals.

Whether it’s branding, pushing specific products or services, educating the audience, or finding angles to approach new markets — your content strategy needs to pursue a clear purpose.

That is why content planning is always a marketer’s job.

You will waste time & money

Useless blog topics take time to implement.

They cost you money.

Each pointless article you publish is an effective article you don’t publish.

If over 50% of your blog posts are posted just because your writers felt like it, you are risking to fail without even learning any lessons.

The worst outcome of this is that you stop blogging completely and you’ll have a hard time convincing your CEO to into content marketing ever again.

Enter another “blogging doesn’t work” story.

Your writers slow down and lose motivation

This one is important.

When writers switch between planning and writing, they get drained faster.

It’s a different skillset and a different mindset. You know better than me that multitasking is a myth.

Most great writers I know love a challenge and they will gladly look for ways to make boring topics fun to read.

But they hate the challenge of coming up with topics, explaining them to decision-makers, defending their choice, and then being responsible for the performance of these blog posts.

Writers prefer to let someone else take that heat and focus on weaving stories that move. Please let it be that way at your company.

Your site underperforms SEO-wise

A lot of great writers somehow manage to blog completely avoiding searchable high-traffic keywords. And these keywords can be added without making their writing worse.

SEO is real and wording matters.

Obviously, there is no need to keyword stuff blog posts 2002-style, but all writers need a bit of a guidance on keyword combos to use, especially in titles and headings.

A carefully crafted content plan takes into account SEO keywords, their volume, and difficulty.

If organic traffic is your main goal then keyword research is the backbone of your content planning.

If you have other goals you can still match and pair your topics with easy-win SEO keywords.

You may miss your target market

Even if your writers come up with relevant and meaningful topics that are aligned with your business goals, they can still miss some interests of your target market.

While your writers may be amazing storytellers and their research is decent, someone needs to back up their research and make sure the writers address all the sub-topics that matter.

Moreover, Google uses their semantic network called Knowledge Graph, natural language processing, AI & machine learning, and probably other things they don’t tell us about — all to try and understand topics, entitities, and rank content based on how complete it is.

So, ideally, you need detailed researched briefs that contain semantic keywords and sub-topics to use in each article.

This can be done during regular content audits once your blog posts stay indexed and gather enough impressions data — but that’s still a content planner’s job you shouldn’t assign to writers.

Note: Avoid using AI tools for content planning, unless it is a part of the larger strategy and is done by someone who knows what they’re doing. I’ve written about the reasons to avoid AI content planners before.