Experts Round Table: 10 Unusual Ideas for your Business Blog

As blogging gains ground and content marketing takes the flag position in the race to influence customers, writing posts that are valuable and entertaining to the reader is becoming increasingly difficult. In our earlier post, we talked about how information and entertainment are one of the most common reasons people read blogs. Then, it is only natural that all your posts either provide information or are entertaining. Coming up with a theme or topic to talk about is a daily chore, or perhaps weekly. Let us look at what inspiration we can take from some of the expert bloggers and keep our idea bucket full at all times.

We have compiled a list of ten winning techniques used by experts around the world. I am sure that reading these will help you generate many ideas and topics for your business blog.

Carol Tice of Tice Writers Inc., a regular contributor to Entrepreneur, talks about how you can write about your industry and your experiences with your customers.

1. Customer Success Story: Did you solve a customer problem recently? Perhaps you got an encouraging testimonial from one of your customers. Ask your customer for permission to weave this testimonial into a blog post. Case studies take a long time to write, but you can create a small post that talks about how you solved a specific problem for the customer and the gains your customers made out of it.

2. Industry Trends: In our dynamic world, changes are a permanent feature. Changes in political and economic situations affect industry related policies and the way they do business. Technological changes often impact how customers interact with you and how they use your products. Talk about these trends and write about what you think of these changes. How will these changes impact your customers and your products?

You could be serving other business or individual customers. No matter who your audience is, people have questions. Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends suggests that you could turn out posts from these questions.

3. Answer Industry related Questions: Industry specific Forums and Groups are often a fertile ground for questions from your consumers or other business stakeholders. New business owners also have a lot of questions about how to go about different things while setting up their business. Write a post about what problems you faced. You could also pick frequently asked questions and write a post on that.

4. How you do things: If you work in a B2B model, your customers will want to know about your processes and team members. Write posts that detail your office infrastructure and how work gets done at your office. Who does what?

However, not every post you write must pitch something or be about convincing your customers. You can give your blog a personal touch and open up to your reader. Miranda Miller suggests these two great ideas for blog posts.

5. Inspiration: We are all inspired by someone at some time in our life. Talk about who you look up to. Past and present industry leaders you like and the business philosophy you believe in. You cannot meet each of your customers or business associates; talking about what you like and believe in can project a positive image to the people who read your blog.

6. Simplify: Is writer’s block real? Well . . . I don’t know. But you can counter that. Help your blog readers understand complicated subjects. Some blog posts, although information rich, are complicated or addressed to peer-level readers. Pick some technical posts and simplify the subject for your readers. Your readers might not be interested in technical reports, but they will surely like a simple summary of these reports.

Ken Mueller makes an excellent point in his list of post ideas.

7. It’s not all about you: Social responsibility need not be fulfilled only by giant corporations. You can contribute in a small way through your blog too. Take-up a local cause you believe in. It could be as simple as building a consensus for funding the local library or new land for a park. Tell people you care about the place where you live.

8. Tips and Tricks: This is never out of vogue. If you sell software or any other product, write posts about how to use them best. What are the things your users can do with them. How can they use them in combination with other products?

These were some excellent ideas from expert bloggers. Reading about so many ideas helped us come up with a couple of our own.

9. Shadow the networks: All leading news networks and magazine blogs provide great content. Look at these networks and see what their experts are discussing. Look at the comments readers post at the end of the post. Do they all agree? What is it that they do not agree about? You can then write your own post on the post and what different opinions people have.

10. Talk about your company: How old is your company? If you have been in the business for long, you surely have a lot to talk about. Even if you are new, you can write about how you got into what you are doing now. What problems you faced and what worked.

These are not the only ideas that can help generate blog posts. But these are some of the most valuable approaches to generate blog post ideas for a business blog. What do you generally blog about on your business blog?