Need blog post ideas for your business?

By Brad Shorr
Best practices

This article and expertise was originally published on Business2Community.

Company blogs are great for Internet marketing:

  • Blogs give you a chance to showcase your expertise.
  • Blogs help you target long-tail keywords for SEO.
  • Blog content helps improve SEO for all website content.
  • Blogs provide useful information for prospects and customers.
  • Blogs bring in new traffic, some of which will convert into sales leads.

The big problem with company blogs

What do we write about? After 10 or 20 or 50 posts, writer’s block sets in. Here are ways to keep the ideas and blog posts flowing:

  • Ask the sales team for topics. They talk to customers every day and know the key issues, challenges and misunderstandings.
  • Ask the customer service team and your suppliers for topic ideas — same logic as with the sales team.
  • Ask customers and prospects directly: What would you like us to talk about on our blog? Even if you get a modest response, the ideas could be the best you’ll ever hear.
  • If you’ve written “Top 10” posts and the like, expand each point into a self-standing blog post. You may be able to come up with 100 new ideas almost immediately!
  • Look for trending topics in your industry. Create a blog post giving your take on the issue. Writing on popular topics attracts readers to the blog — and if you link these posts to relevant product/service pages on your main site, you may find yourself getting some high-quality sales leads.
  • Seek guest posts from high-profile bloggers and business figures in your industry. Guest posts add authority to your blog and bring in new visitors … and thus new sources of leads.
  • Take a contrary position on some piece of conventional industry wisdom that you know isn’t correct. This type of post generates a lot of interest and social media shares, again bringing in new visitors. It may also bring in a lot of back-links — great for SEO. Just make sure your post is well thought out!
  • Do mini case studies. Highlighting a creative application of your product and/or showing how a customer benefited can raise your credibility and get prospects thinking about how they can benefit by doing business with you. Plus, your customers will appreciate the exposure and stay loyal.

The overall strategy here is to focus on topics that appeal to prospects, and get them interested in learning more. You don’t have to tell the whole story in the blog post; in fact, leaving a little information out makes interested parties a bit more eager to contact you.

 

This article was written by Brad Shorr from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Twitter or its affiliates.

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