A blog can bring great benefits to your business. It’s great for SEO because of all the keyword-focused content, especially if you get a lot of comments. It helps you communicate with your audience, hear their opinions, and interact with them casually. It has great linking and sharing potential. There’s really nothing bad about having a business blog. Except that it’s hard work. Starting a blog and then never posting and never responding to any comments is bad. When you have a blog, you need to commit yourself to it. You need to be posting at least a couple of times a week, or it’s just not worth it.
Two blog posts a week adds up pretty fast. How are you supposed to come up with that many different ideas? Because of course you can’t just write the same post over and over. You’ve got to keep coming up with new things to say. Where do those ideas come from?
The truth is, you can find inspiration anywhere. There isn’t really a shortage of things to write about; it’s just that sometimes the right idea just doesn’t hit you. But often a great idea will hit you when you’re not trying to think of it. You might go out to lunch one day and the waiter will say something that gives you an idea. You could be listening to the radio and hear a song that gives you a thought. You could just be walking down the street and get a sudden inspiration. That’s why you should always keep some kind of note-taking tool handy. It might be a mobile app, like Evernote, or just good old-fashioned notebook and pen.
But sometimes the perfect blog post doesn’t hit you while you’re out at lunch, and you don’t have all the time in the world to wait for it. So what can you do? You might go the social media route. Throw a question out on your Facebook page and see what kind of responses you get from your fans. Then you can put that question and those answers in a blog post, or you might use the answers you get as a gauge of what your customers are thinking and use that for further inspiration. Or you can find think about all the questions they are asking you. At Marketers Anonymous, we often get ideas from real conversations we have with people and from the questions they ask us.
Still stuck? Look around for news and expert opinions related to your industry, and write up an analysis. Or find one or two of those experts and interview them or ask them for a guest post. Getting experts on your blog can seriously raise the level of trust your site visitors will have in you. Sometimes you can even find inspiration reading about other industries that have nothing to do with yours. Reading different things like this can force you into a new pattern of thinking and give you different kinds of ideas.
Remember, you don’t have to write a whole book every time. For SEO purposes, it is best to have posts of at least 350 words, but if you’re posting a few times a week they don’t all have to be so long. Once in a while you might just throw in a quick post about something that happened to you on the subway, or a brief paragraph about a conversation you had with a customer. These short and sweet posts can be where you let your unique voice really shine through, which will help you connect with your readers on a closer level. For more details visit http://www.manonymous.com/
Your Next Blog Post Could Be Anything