The challenge for any blogger personal or corporate is to continually come up with content that brings the readers and viewers back to the blog. The corporate blog should not be about “selling” it is about educating and solving your customers problems. Do that and they will keep showing up to learn more and to find out how they solve those day to day challenges that life and business brings.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that content is not just text, it is any type of media and includes images, video and audio and all types of reincarnations of those such as PDF’s, eBooks, Powerpoint presentations and these can all be published onto social media platforms, such as YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare to name a few. You need to think like a publisher!
So how do you find the inspiration to develop and publish content for your blog. Here are 30 ideas to get you moving.
- When attending a conference take your Flipcam video cam with you and do some short one on one video interviews. You may need to contact them prior to the conference or you could be spontaneous, but you will need to keep it brief 2-5 minutes max.
- Write about industry News – whats happening this week, this month
- Read and develop content on industry Trends – where is the industry going, what are the emerging hot segments
- Find out about your customers Pain Points – Write posts that provide solutions for your customers problems
- Write about customers successes – Write up a case study about a clients successful project, they will often let you publish their name
- Publish content on what not to do! – highlighting where something hasn’t worked
- Create a video blog post by interviewing a successful client – this can a powerful providing authentic evidence of authority and credibility for both you and the client
- Write articles for the different types of customers that are relevant for each of your vertical markets
- Brainstorm blog post topics with colleagues and management and create a list for future reference and planning
- Subscribe to the top industry blogs in your market, both company blogs and personal blogs for ideas
- Look through your latest news releases for ideas
- Look through your competitors latest news releases for a possible blog topic
- Sign up other staff to write on topics in your industry or market that they are passionate about
- Engage with bloggers that have expertise in your industry closely associated topics and give them a guest post slot once a month and then promise (and deliver) to promote them and the post
- Develop a series of “How To” blog posts
- Turn the “how to” blog posts into short videos
- Case studies are always popular to write about and not just your own
- Place Powerpoint presentations on your blog by posting and then embedding links from Slideshare
- Run polls and surveys on your blog
- Take the results of your polls or survey and turn them into a blog post. A lot of people want know the results as over time the blog post is buried in the archives
- Revisit the comments of your blog and see if there is are elements or a theme that you could write around a particular blog
- Subscribe to Google Alerts in order to find ideas for new content
- Write an article about the top bloggers in your industry and promote them and tell peoiple why they are successful
- When speaking or presenting, record it on video and upload it to the company YouTube channel. It will be a constant resource for clients as well as adding to your websites SEO
- When a visiting speaker attends your organisation video their presentation and embed it in your blog
- Make a list of the top successful people in your industry and put in place a weekly schedule to interview them and you will then have a weekly highlight video blog post that will inspire your readers. And guess what! The leaders you interview will promote that blog post to their social network
- Bundle up the best blog posts about about your niche and turn it into a PDF book that you can feature on your blog. You could sell the PDF for lets say $19. (37signals who took its own experiences as a web startup and published them on their corporate blog and monetized that over 2 years into a $750,000 revenue stream by publishing and then repackaging it)
- Take your video posts and turn it into an audio podcast add then develop and publish that into slideshow format format content into a PDF
- Enlist a keen photographer in your company to take photos at events and then set up a company Flickr account post the photos to Flickr (this is also good for Search engine optimization). These photos could even be used for inspiration for developing humorous posts about the office that personalizes your company
- Mount a video camera in your car if you are in an industry that involves getting out and about such as real estate and make a video blog while you are “on the job” (but not driving of course). Ian Watt from Vancouver does this and creates short video blog posts talking about the industry he is obviously passionate about.
These are just some of the ways you can develop your content for your blog. What other ideas do you have that have inspired your blogs content?
Image by qisur