8 Ideas for Your Blog

If you use a blog for your business – either as your primary website or as a supporting site to demonstrate your thought leadership and to interact with your audience – you may face a common problem that many bloggers face: "What the heck do I write about?"

This can be a common challenge among bloggers. They may start out with plenty of ideas and material but then soon the well of ideas may dry up. So, in this blog, we’ll give you some ideas that you can use to write more blogs. (Note: Not every one of these topics will work for everyone; it depends on your business and your readers and your own personality, so pick what works for you and think about whether you can augment some of the other ideas.

1. Subscribe to an article RSS feed in a topic that is relevant to your blog. Then, choose one and write about it: Start by linking to it, then summarizing it in a paragraph or two, then extending the idea or adding your own or disagreeing with it.

2. Create a weekly series of your favorite [whatever]: YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, books, websites, whatever you want. These are good to prewrite so you have constant content appearing on your blog even when you can’t blog in person.

3. Visit Google News and search for the type of industry that your business is in (i.e., finance or real estate or business or media or tech) and choose a news story to comment on. You might write something like, "The Insider’s Viewpoint: Why the New York Times Got It Wrong".

4. Choose a topic on which you can write a lot of content and create a series that lasts several days. For example, "10 Ways that Twitter Can Help Your Business" (and you’d post one per day for 10 days).

5. Invite guest bloggers to participate in your blog. Don’t do it too often but it’s a helpful way to just get another perspective. You might consider a reciprocal arrangement where you each write on the other person’s blog once per month for a different perspective.

6. Relate pop culture to your topic in some way. If a popular movie has just been released, try to create a tie-in. The funnier the better. A productivity coach might write: "10 Things that ‘G.I. Joe’ Taught Me About Time Management" or a lifestyle coach might write: "What Edward from ‘Twilight’ Would Say About Getting Along With Your Family." Obviously, you’ll need to have seen the movie but the actual advice itself can trend towards the humorous rather than valuable. And, you don’t have to stick to movies. Television, radio, books, and music can all offer fertile ground to bring pop culture into the mix.

7. Lists. People love lists and tend to read them more than other types of blogs. So choose a topic and write a list. (Like… oh, I don’t know, how about "8 Ideas for your Blog"!).

8. Extremes. People also love to read about extremes: "The Best Twitter Tips Ever" or "The Worst Mistake You Could Ever Make on Squidoo" or "The Dumbest Thing I Ever Did on AdWords" or whatever. These don’t have to be long but they should be extreme.