The most frequent reason people tell me they don’t write blogs is because they don’t know what to write about - so here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing.
1: Answer a question
When I’m networking
people often ask me questions around my area of expertise. My customers ask me questions too, so there’s
always something to write about. Cast
your mind back to questions you know you’ve answered more than once - there’s a
reason people ask the same question - you may think ‘it’s obvious’, but to them
it’s not.
2: Write a case study
It’s always useful
to have case studies on your website and having a blog category for case
studies makes it easy to add your latest success. Typically a good case study has 4 elements:
- The problem or customer brief
- What you did about it
- What the solution was
- What the customer said (it’s easy to ask the customer for a testimonial when you’re featuring them in a case study. Remember to get them to focus on results.
3: Comment on something topical
Your opinion on any
RELEVANT issue can make a good blog article.
You can either take the logical approach, by laying out the situation,
the pros and cons and ending with your opinion or you can go into a full-on
rant! As long as you don’t descend into
name-calling, you can end up with a compelling read. My advice - if you’re ranting, set it aside
and read it 24 hours later before publishing it.
If you struggle to
stay up-to-date with everything that’s in the press, set up Google alerts for
your keywords and you’ll get an email when those keywords are mentioned, with
links to the relevant articles.
4: Review a product (or more than
one)
If there are a
number of products that would be of
interest to your clients and can be related to your area of expertise, do your
own review of one or more of these. If
you’re doing more than one, create a structure for each - e.g. product name,
what it does, features, cost, marks out of 10 or stars out of 5.
The products don’t
have to be tangible items, they can be software, online tools, publications,
anything that you can offer your opinion on.
5: Feature a customer
This is an
alternative to a case study - ask your star customers if they’re willing to be
interviewed. You’ll need to come up with
a set of questions and, if you do more than one of this kind of interview,
maybe consider a standard set of questions to work with. Stay focused around the area you are expert
in and how this works for their business, otherwise your blog is in danger of
becoming too random and general.
6: Share an image
If you’ve got an
image that’s relevant to your business, share that and comment on it and why
it’s important. This might be new
equipment that will make a significant difference to your business, so you can
explain why you’ve got it and the outcomes that your customers can expert as a
result. It be the basis for a ‘how to’
article - like how to create an infographic or the post styles that work best
on Instagram.
7: Solve a problem
If you know your
customers well you’ll know what their biggest problems are. You don’t need to feature a particular
customer, you can simply set out the problem and the impact of it, then outline
your solution and the benefits it offers.
8: Explain a process
If your business
involves a process that progresses an issue from A to F, outline how it works
showing steps B, C, D and E along the way.
Don’t forget to show how this benefits your customers.
9: Interview another expert
This is a great way
to create joint ventures. Find another
company with the same audience that you have; they may offer complementary
services or products to the ones you provide, so would make a great business
partner. Offer to interview them and
introduce them to your readers and maybe discuss how they could do something
similar - either by a reciprocal article on their blog or by featuring your
business in their newsletter. It’s a
win-win situation for both companies.
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