Generating ideas for your company blog is all about connections. Basically, such connections come as a result of associating previously known ideas and facts and restructuring the gathered pieces of information.
To make that happen you need to have information at first. Consequently, knowing more about your niche will serve as fuel for new insights and ideas.
One of the approaches to generating ideas is the quantitative approach, it is about gathering as much information as possible. Quantity first, quality later. It does not matter if the idea sounds silly. Write down an idea if it comes, or use the brainstorming technique and write down as many ideas as you can think of, without analyzing them.
If you’ve been sitting all day and can’t come up with any solutions, these seven tactics will help you generate outstanding blog ideas in no time!
1. Focus on your customers’ needs. Think of the best things and services your business can offer, and relate that to your customers’ expectations. For example, if you are a vegetarian café and your clients expect you to have rice noodles you can start serving them and then invite people to try the dish via your blog!
2. Read lists. Just try googling “50 articles on… (the topic that interests you)” and read the results thoroughly. By the time you finish reading the whole list, your brain will have generated something of interest. This technique is particularly useful if you need to think of an idea fast.
3. Get inspiration from title generators! For instance, you want to write something about “Food Quality”, which is a broad topic. These online tools such as InBoundNow will help you narrow topics down, as it will provide suggestions like “How 8 Things Will Change The Way You Approach Food Quality”.
4. You can also use alert tools. One of the most popular services is Mention. It can help you monitor certain search queries so you will know what your competitors are up to. You can receive updates via email or RSS, and also within the app. On the free market, you have Google Alerts, Google Analytics, or Google Insights. You can easily find the relevant wording on your topic there.
5. Make use of Question-Answer Tools and discussion groups. Some of them include Yahoo! Answers, Ask.com, etc. It’s relatively easy to translate people’s answers into relevant ideas for your blog. A free service from WordTracker automatically gets you answers from the most popular services. Using these tools will help you understand your customers’ needs, which you can then translate into titles for your blog posts.
6. See what others are doing and learn from their inspiration! There are a great number of blogs, video-hosting websites, article catalogs, etc. Why not find a blog about the hospitality industry or about the restaurant business to monitor? It’s also critical to explore what to do after you publish a blog post.
7. Take time to relax. Rest is very important. Some of the established writers say their best ideas come to them when they are doing the dishes. Some of the breakthrough ideas in science appeared not when scientists were in the lab, but when they were on vacation.
Another way of generating ideas is to clear your mind so that you don’t have the constant flow of thoughts that turn in your head. You just sit in silence quietly and let ideas come through you, without consciously generating them. But that’s a whole different topic.
Either way, have a pen and a piece of paper always at hand so that you can jot the ideas down as they come.
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This post was contributed by Rob Greenberg. Rob is a copyright and plagiarism consultant at PlagiarismDetect.com. Rob runs the company’s blog and also takes part in testing plagiarism-checking software.