I’ve written and published a lot of advice on how to find business blog ideas to engage and grow you customer and prospect. I come back to this topic occasionally because it’s important and causes a lot of frustration among those responsible for digital marketing and content creation. When we can pursue a fresh, new strategy, it pumps a little life into our routines.
I want to share a fairly simple idea with you today, but it’s a good one, and one that may even get you out of the workplace and away from your computer screen for a couple of hours.
Why not touch bases with the analog world to find digital content inspiration?
Spend some time browsing the publications that interest your customers and clients. You probably subscribe to some of these; skim them for ideas. (More guidance on that in just a moment.)
But don’t stop with the publications you have in your possession. Take a trip to a large library and cruise up and down their shelves of magazines to find publications you might not regularly read. Grab a handful and sit down with them…and your smartphone.
Start thumbing through the magazines looking for interesting topics. You will get some good general ideas very quickly. When you come to longer articles, consider the major topic, but also look for the subheads. They can reveal smaller topics that you can cover in shorter blog posts.
I said to keep your smartphone handy. Use your camera and an app like Evernote to capture ideas. Snap photos of headlines and artwork. Be sure you organize them in a way that will allow you to find them when you actually need them! In Evernote they can all be stored in one notebook. Consistently using a keyword like “article ideas” doesn’t hurt either.
Let me give you a solid reason why taking inspiration from traditional publications makes a lot of sense. Printing a magazine is expensive. When editors decide to publish an article on real paper, they have to be convinced that there is reader interest in the topic.
Honestly, online publishing isn’t so picky, in fact, it works in almost the opposite way. While traditional publishers need to believe that something is worthwhile before printing it, online publishers often “print” a whole array of articles in order to find out what articles are a hit with readers.
Before I close this, let me give you the links to a few articles on my site that suggest even more business blog ideas and strategies to inspire topics:
- 10 sure-winner blog post ideas
- 4 little-known strategies for creating powerful marketing blog topics
- Need Blog Ideas? Steal Them!
- How lazy people discover great blog topics
How about you? Do you have any favorite ways to jump start your creative process and develop good blog topics? Share them in the comments section below.
