After all the hard work of setting up your business blog, it now comes down to the most important reason for having a blog in the first place – getting your content, your message out to the world. For some, this is an easy process. For many others though, publishing useful and unique content on a regular basis can be seriously difficult. Differentiating yourself from other business bloggers comes down to a little understanding of who your core readers are. Set aside some time to research your audience and find out what they want to read about. Here are some considerations to keep in mind when publishing your content: Should I make my posts educational, newsworthy, informative, entertaining and debatable, or a combination of all of those? How long should my posts be? Should I consider blogging partnerships (such as getting guest bloggers to write unique content for your blog)?
The initial excitement of publishing a blog can quickly dissipate when your “content well” starts to run dry. So where do you turn for ideas and inspiration to get readers to queue up to read your work? Well, let’s start with how you can categorize your content in a way that can potentially skyrocket your readership: The infamous Top 10 lists How-tos Review information Interview someone within your business Relevant business case-studies Latest trends and new information Recommend other business blogs that are of interest to your readers.
But all of the above can be useless if you can’t get to a source for inspiration. So here are some of the best places to turn when you need to get those creative juices flowing:
News sites – CNN, Yahoo News, Google News are just some of the many news websites available to spark an interesting idea for a blog post. Dig into news stories and press to see what’s important for your blog. Put your opinion on it and you’ve just got yourself a new post. But don’t stop there. Look for news sites that are specific to your industry as well. For example, if you’re blogging about finance, go to Bloomberg Financial News and get ideas from there. About.com is another site that covers a gamut of topics which makes for such a great source for content ideas.
Online Groups/Social Networking Sites/Forums – Message board forums, Facebook groups and Yahoo groups are a treasure trove of information. Your potential readers and customers may be lurking within these groups, freely exchanging the kind of information that a market research company would pay thousands of dollars for. Don’t ignore forums that are relevant to your industry. Like social networking sites and online groups, forums attract the kind of audience that is interested in the information you are offering.
Social Bookmarking Services – Like social networking sites, social bookmarking services are all the rage today. These services allow users to rate and recommend topics that are popular with them. They are a portal into the hottest and latest trends according to public opinion. Visit sites like Technorati.com, Delicious, stumbleupon.com, Reddit.com and Digg.com to get blogging ideas. While there are a large number of other social bookmarking sites that are springing up quite regularly on the web, these are the ones most commonly referred to by professional bloggers for research.
High Traffic Sites – Another great source of blogging ideas can be found on high traffic sites such as alexa.com, amazon.com, ebay.com, craigslist.org and wikipedia.org. Article ideas can be mined simply by going through the categories of these sites. Article Directory – Article directory provides you with the option to repost articles you like on your blog. If you have a can of a day, this can come in handy, but need something to whet your readers appetite. Even if you don’t intend to publish any of those articles, use them as a source of ideas for writing your next post. Some of the more popular directories are Ezinearticles.com, garticles.com and articlecity.com. These articles are free to re-print, but, read the terms on these sites on how to go about re-printing them. I don’t recommend doing this, but I do recommend curating content from these sources, see the Content Curation section.
Some Other Sources- Another idea-generating method is to look at what people are searching for and decide if you can blog about these search terms. Visit popular sites like Google Zeitgeist and Metacrawler.com for this purpose. You can use keyword tools like WordTracker.com. Try searching for ideas using a blog search engine. Try Technorati.com and Alltop.com for potential ideas.
The next step is to create a folder on your desktop for ideas. Call it an idea bank, IT Resources or Inspiration. Choose a name that reminds you of the purpose on the content inside. My folder is called Inspiration. There is also a great online tool that will help you collect your inspiration and populate an idea bank online. It’s called Evernote. In this section I’m going to show you how to set up Evernote and use them.
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