Generating Ideas for Posts
I know that sometimes I struggle with coming up for content to blog about. So many times, I feel like it has all been said before and 100 different ways. In an effort to try and come up with some ideas for myself and to help my clients, I have some go-to resources and want to share them here. One thing I have learned from working with clients is that when you spend all day, every day, working in your business and industry you think that what you know is common knowledge, and therefore sharing that common knowledge is not interesting to other people outside of your specialty. This really isn’t true. You can almost always (I’m sure there is some topic that wouldn’t be appropriate to blog about) find someone that is interested in learning more about you, your company and your industry. So with that out of the way, let’s come up with some content ideas.
I did a post last month about using your inbox as inspiration, but it bears repeating here. Keep an eye on the questions that drop into your inbox, and see if you can compose a blog post to respond to the question. This provides you with two benefits, one you have a great blog post and two, in the future, you can point to this post when asked the question again. Let’s face it, you will be asked it again. It can testify that it works because it happened to me last week. I had a question pop up in my inbox and was able to respond with a link to a blog post.
A follow up to the idea of using your inbox to generate ideas is to also use discussion groups or LinkedIn questions in the same way. People are asking questions in many areas, so find one that matches your knowledge and get writing. You can always go back to where you found the question and respond with the link to drive a little more traffic and provide the answer. Once you start looking at what is on other people’s mind, you may find an overwhelming amount of potential blog posts.
Another great content generator is reading industry news and other people’s blog posts. While doing your regular reading, you may find an interesting article or point of view upon which you can comment. Write up some quick thoughts on it and post it to your blog with a link to the original. Often times someone else’s thoughts can really spur a flood of ideas. Use these ideas to share the information, expand on the idea with your own thoughts or even to disagree with the other person’s point of view.
There are a alot other ways to generate ideas. What are your favorite?
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Great post. I use the inbox trick a lot. I also keep track of the questions my clients often ask and will turn those into blog posts. Industry news is plentiful as well. I suggest signing for some Google alerts. After a while you will find yourself going to the same source(s) for a specific topic. At that point you might want to sign up for their email newsletter or RSS feed.
Thanks again Beth, now I need to write a Blog post myself, hmm, what should I write about???