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.
10: Create a tips list
Every business owner develops smart strategies for things around their expertise. Put together your top 3, 5, 10, 35 tips (odd numbers work better than even – with the exception of 10). You’ll have plenty of material for your blogs with this! (After all, you’ve just read my tips list, haven’t you?)
