Blog Writing Ideas for Your Business

Blogging is a great way to connect with your existing customers, strengthen your brand, and bring new customers to your business website. The real challenge is coming up with ideas to write about on your business blog.

You might already suspect your topic ideas for your business blog are boring. Despite the infinite number of options, some business blog topics will be more effective than others in helping you gain traffic, exposure, and profit from your blog.

Get ideas for your business blog topics

Follow these steps to brainstorm writing ideas for your blog.

Start by creating a list of everything your business offers or can offer to your clients. This includes product descriptions, your various service descriptions, your special announcements and press releases…

Once you’ve gotten this list out of your system, set it aside. Don’t worry—you’ll get back to it. But, this is not where you want your mind to be when generating blog post ideas that will actually interest your customers.

Writing topics that focus on your products or services are very important for attracting prospects who are already interested in what you have to offer, but they are also low-hanging fruit. (If you’re unsure of the best way to write a post about one of your products or services, read how to make your blog post attractive to Google and other search engines. Then, come back and read this article.)

What about those people who don’t even know your product or service exists?

To find a blog post topic that’s engaging and interesting to all of your readers, you should never focus only on your products and services—instead, you should think about delivering value.

Blog writing ideas that deliver value

What exactly does this mean? Valuable to whom? Valuable to your customer. Remember that your readers want your writing to be all about them–not you.

This is where it’s easy to veer back into our own STUFF. We start babbling about our products and services and how great they are. Don’t do it. Of course your stuff is valuable. Here’s the problem: Your prospect doesn’t know that yet. And, they don’t want to be convinced. At least...not yet.

Instead of talking about the value of your products or services, start with the information your prospect already values. Things like:

? inside information on changes in their business field—not yours

? information about their competitors—not yours

? inspirational/funny stories

? proven time savers

? their hobbies—not yours

People want to be understood, and they want answers to their business problems—not “solutions.” Everyone has solutions. That’s just code for “products and services.” If you don’t know the real answers to the unspoken business questions your customers have on their minds, then you might not have much credibility with them.

This is where really knowing your ideal customer really pays off. The better you know your ideal customer—down to the type of car they drive—the easier it is to understand their concerns and to write something that will resonate with them.

As my friend Jeffrey Gitomer says, “People don’t want to be sold, but they love to buy!” Make it easier for your prospective clients to buy with blog post topics that add real value to their lives—and not just from your product or service. When you provide consistently high-quality writing on topics your customers already care about, you build trust and sell your business.

Conduct an interview for your business blog post

One of the easiest ways to create value-adding content for your blog is through interviews. Interviewing you? No way!

You’re going to interview two types of people:

1.????? Your happy customer

2.????? People your prospects are already interested in

Interviews for blog posts are not difficult. There’s no need for recording devices or quick notetaking. Follow these steps to create a successful interview-based blog post:

Create 5 or fewer interview questions: imagine what your prospects might like to know about this person.

Send these questions to the interviewee: Ask for their permission to publish an article about them.

Make it as easy as possible: They should respond to your questions in writing and even have the option of making up their own!

Showcase your interviewee: An interview post should always feature a photo of the person being interviewed.

Imagine yourself creating and delivering interesting content tailored specifically to the interests of your prospects. Then, think about the tired and sales-y content that your competition churns out.

When your prospect sees an email in the inbox from both you and your boring competitor, which email do you think is getting opened? Which one is getting deleted? I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see what your next blog post is going to be!