Building a Successful Blog — Part 15 — Where to find ideas for your blog post

As we continue with our ongoing series, Building a Successful Blog, posting to our blogs has been the theme for the last few episodes.

After some of you read the recent posts about posting to your blogs and left me comments, mainly via email, I thought it would be best to tackle one of the most common concerns most of you seem to have. And that is where the heck do I find ideas for blog post so I have the material to post to my blog as often as I need to.

Let me first say, I do feel your pain. Those of us who champaign blogging as an effective marketing tool for your business or professional service firm struggle with this too. However, what most of us do is, we over think the problem of where do we find topics to blog about.

Where to find ideas for your blog post:

Social Media This is in my opinion, one of the funniest sources of blog post fodder. You would have to live in a cave to not know what twitter is. In fact, this might be the first post you have read here if you don’t know what twitter is. I talk about it often and use it daily.

As a blogging tool, twitter is useful for not only promoting your blog. It is very useful as a way to gather blogging fodder. I use twitter almost daily for post ideas. And one of the best ways to do this is to just ask a question. I often ask questions on twitter days if not weeks before I write a pillar post for this blog. Before I even started to write the post, I asked a simple question on twitter to get me started in my thinking process. And continue the conversation on that question for a series tweets to flesh out ideas for the post. More times than not, using this method will give me more than one post idea. And sometimes leads to a short series of post.

What is so great about asking questions on twitter to get post ideas is the fact you are taking your thought process to the “people”. You are actually asking the question to those who are more likely than not, reading your blog. By doing so, you are getting your readers or prospective readers engaged in your blog without them even visiting your blog.

Once you get them involved in the research and development of your post, you are allowing them to become invested in your blog and your postings too. If you have been a regular reader of Blog For Profit, you have seen me mention F.L.E.E. before. The last two letters of F.L.E.E. give us engage and empower. And asking questions on twitter, getting our readers and prospective readers involved in our posting process early, also gets those tweeters engaged in our blog and the conversation going on there. And we are empowering our readers to get involved too.

Reader Comments If there is one thing I have found over the last 5 years of blogging, the readers of your blog give you some of the best post ideas you can find. Especially in the comments on your blog. The comments on your blog are a gold mine of ideas. And sometimes the comments on a particular post might be better then your actual post. You should not overlook taking the comments you receive on your blog and using them as post ideas.

What is also great about this technique is the fact you can include the comment and the commenter in your blog post. If you use a comment as an idea for a post, give the commenter a link to their blog and even better, see if you can link to one of their post that is relevant to the post you are doing. Give the commenter some link love and they will remember that.

Forums I personally don’t belong to very many forums at the present. We have our members’ forums at BlawgingLawyers which I am on of course. And in the past, I use to be on a few forums where I would take some time to answer questions involving what I did in my firm. Not only are forums a great way to get noticed and gain traffic to your blog. Forums can be a great source of post material. There are a lot of common questions you see in the forums. Questions which are asked over and over again. Why not take those common questions, make the question a post title/headline and then answer the question in your blog post.

What you may find by doing this is that you are going to gain some good organic traffic from these “answer” post you are doing. The same can be said for the next source.

Client/Customer Questions In any type of business, whether it be a business which sells products or a service business, you get questions every day from clients and customers. And if you publish a blog to promote or market your business you should be taking advantage of all those questions. When I first started my service firm’s blog, one way I was able to move up in the search engines so fast and so high was to take those questions and make a post out of them.

What I soon discovered was the simple fact those questions I was getting every day either on the phone or in person from clients and prospective clients were some of the same search terms people were typing into Google and Yahoo. And, what I also found, they were basic questions. Questions which made great blog post and were easy to answer.

Of course I never used names or anything that might identify someone in the blog post. And when the post would go up, I did notice my hits and placement improve in the search engines.

Everyday you are getting questions and/or comments from clients, customers and prospects. If you are not taking those and making them into blog post you are really missing out on a great opportunity. Not only is it great post content, it shows you are connected to what is going on in your niche. Using those questions and/or comments also gets you involved in the conversation taking place in your niche or market.

Yahoo Answers Do you see a pattern here? Questions are one of the best sources of post fodder you can find. And another source of questions is Yahoo Answers. “Can’t find it with search? Ask”, is the tagline for Yahoo Answers. And what is best about this service, there are a ton of categories to pick from. So, no matter what niche you are blogging about, chances are, you are going to find a question you can answer.

Below is just a small sample of the questions I was able to locate by typing in “blogging” into the search box.

Yahoo! Answers - Search Results for _blogging_.jpg

As you can see from this sample, there are 5 good topics I could use for this blog alone. Don’t overlook this great tool for finding blog post fodder. What is also great about using Yahoo Answers to find your post ideas is the fact you can take your post and answer the question in Yahoo Answers and put a link to your blog post right in your answer.

Seminars and Continuing Education Classes We all go to seminars from time to time. And for those who must maintain a license, you usually have to attend continuing education classes each year. Seminars and educational classes are a great source of blog post too. Usually, at least if you are lucky, seminars and CEC’s provide information about new advances in your particular niche. Why not tell your readers about what you have learned at these seminars. Apply what you have learned to your niche and solve problems for your readers.

Blogs you read This one should be so obvious it should jump up and bite you on the butt. If you are using the F.L.E.E. technique as I mentioned above, you should be out there reading other blogs in your niche. Taking blog post you have read and applying them to your location or niche is a great source of blog topics too. And what is also great about this is the fact you can put an organic link in your post back to the source post you are quoting in your blog.

This accomplishes two things:

You are providing your readers with even more information. Not only are you quoting this source, you are giving a link to them. Your readers not only have your blog for information, they have this other blog too. Your readers will actually appreciate the fact you are not trying to just keep their attention on your blog. You are showing them you want to be a source of information.
This other blogger is going to notice that you quoted and linked to them too. Remember one of the activities we need to do as bloggers is to get our own blogs noticed. Quoting and linking to other bloggers is a great way to do this. And the organic link you are putting in this relevant post of yours gets Google attention too. Placing organic links inside a blog post to other relevant blogs and their post, is a key technique to gain SEO.

Current News Stories or Magazine Articles Finally, you should be and most likely are reading trade journals, news articles and other news sources in and around your particular niche or market. You should take the opportunity to show your readers you are keeping up to date on what is going on in your niche and market. Not only will you do this, you will once again be providing some great information to your readers.

Your Assignment

Take a couple of the examples we have discussed above and write 3 blog post this week using what you find. What you will come to realize is finding information and ideas to write about is not as hard as you thought.

Make sure to leave your comments and questions on this post. Let’s keep the conversation going.