Either when thinking about setting their company blog or in the early stages of writing it, I get a lot of worried calls from people asking how they will find topics to write about. Don’t worry about it - I can guarantee that this will not be a problem! Why do I say that? Well, you know your subject inside out or else you wouldn’t be in that particular business and so what you will find you mainly do is try to select the best topics for your readers from among those you could write about.

For me, there are two main sources of ideas: you and everyone else.

Blog Post Ideas - You

You’ll find that during the day you’ll start to think “Oh, that would make a good topic for my blog” (sad but true!) and you’ll want to make sure that you capture all these ideas that come to you. Personally I use a nice and easy solution for this: I keep a notebook with me all the time. Why? So that I can note down any ideas that occur to me during the day - and, believe me, they can come at the weirdest moments.

They could be triggered by any event, by something that I see which sparks a connection or by a comment that somebody makes to me. I note down the idea and any associated thoughts that crop up at the time and then I go back, review and use these ideas as and when I need to.

Blog Post Ideas - Everyone Else

When it comes to “everyone else”, the best people to take ideas from are your customers, your prospects and your partners - these are all the sorts of people who are likely to ask the sort of questions which others would benefit from as well. Ideal to get more people interested in your blog and a great source of inspiration.

So, make a note of the main ones and make a point of talking about them on your blog. You can treat it in the same way you do when you get a question from the audience when you are making a presentation or giving a talk - that’s to say, repeat the question that has been asked so that the rest of the audience can hear and then go ahead and answer it.

Do the same in your blog. You could even wrap it in a story about how the question came about, stories are always more memorable to your readers. In this way, you’re sharing information which will answer relevant and real questions that should help your customers use your product better and help your prospects to understand its potential better.

So that you have this resource developing on an ongoing basis, I suggest that:

• you keep a folder in your email system and make a copy of both the question you receive and the response you send back - this will in itself form the basis of your business blog post;
• after meetings with clients, prospects or suppliers, note down some of the key questions that they asked and which were clearly on interest to them;
• at Conferences and Exhibitions, keep a record of the questions or the areas that visitors to your stand keep asking about and are showing most interest in.

You’ll soon find that you have topics for your posts planned out well in advance and as you write the posts, you will hopefully also start to receive comments which will start to take the discussions and questions in other directions as well.

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