How to find great ideas for your blog posts
How do you find ideas on what to to blog about? Naturally if you are using Organic PR then you should be publishing blogs that talk about your businesses and how you can help people.
With a clear idea about how you want to promote your own business you then need to find writing opportunities that allow you to demonstrate your expertise.
There is no doubt a career as a journalist has helped me. Naturally it means I know how to write stories and taught me to effectively observe well enough to narrate. That helps with writing up events we attend and interpreting daily events. Now, you might not be a journalist, but simply being more observant can help.
Also, remember that most blogging is simply story telling. What stories are you telling your clients? The chances are the same stories you actually tell can also be used for blog posts.
Good blog posts should include a photograph and we have blogged about how to find photographs for your blog already and that explains how simple looking for photographs can inspire ideas.
What about more ways to find ideas? Well what do you read? We use 'My Morning Coffee', a plug in for the Firefox web browser that effectively allows you to open a different set of bookmarks each day through a single click. It is great for visiting your favourite and most inspirational websites. You could always set up a folder, perhaps inspirationally called: 'Blog Inspirations' and save bookmarks for any websites that you think will give you ideas.
Think about using Google Alerts and the search engine will email you regularly with links to any topics that you want to know about. Not only a good way to stay on top of your industry news, it may well supply ideas for stories.
We have already blogged about how to find ideas on Twitter, but any of the social media platforms could provide inspiration and as ever how you use them to promote your own business is likely to make an interesting blog post.
Two great services offered by fellow social media experts that help you find ideas that include a weekly blog post and a weekly email. The blog post is 'The Week Ahead: Your Web Business' published by Internet Psychologist Graham Jones every Sunday. They cover current affairs, planning your week, good ideas for content and some recommended reading. Certainly it has helped us discover new ideas! The weekly email is 'Blog Crazy' an idea from Search Engine Optimisation queen, Nikki Pilkington. It follows a similar approach and each email is brimming with ideas inspired by what is happening in the news.
Hopefully this post will have helped you come up with some great ideas for your blog. Did it inspire you? Tell us in the comments below and do share if you have any ideas of your own on how to be inspired to write blog posts.
This is part of Morgan PR's Blogging Best Practice series.