Ideas for blog posts

Some people find this to be a stumbling block – what to write about beyond the immediately obvious topics directly related to your business/service/sector.

Offering variety makes your blog something that people will feel inclined to return to, and grab attention too.

But how on earth do you keep coming up with new topics? Well obviously with such a wide focus for the Blogmistress – we blog about more than just WordPress, but on everything that brings you to using WordPress too – and that can be small business owners, hobbyists, communities, revenue generating – and then we bring in the Internet marketing side of things too. Plus there will always be new plugins, themes, upgrades to take you through – so for us it’s easy (you should see the list of draft posts!).

Just the other week Sally Walker had a bunch of us on her webcast blog about buying a loaf of bread from Sainsburys – perhaps a little far off topic for most of our blogs but it demonstrated how social media can work for you and that we can indeed blog about anything.

A few things to consider when your inspiration runs low:

Consider inviting some guest bloggers to add a new aspect and dimension to your blog.

Team up with some business friends and share ideas, ask for what they’d like to read on your blog – just chatting, even online, will likely pop some ideas into your head.

Do a keyword search in Twitter and keep an eye on that stream (using Hootsuite or TweetDeck is helpful for this).

Have a play with the Google Keyword Tool – enter a general term relating to your blog and see what comes up – this can be a useful thing to do now and again, not only for some inspiration but to keep an eye on your best keywords too (have a look at this previous post on what your customers search for to get an idea of how to use the tool – though it has since been updated – you’ll still get the idea).

And what would you add to this – how do you tap into a rich seam of ideas for your blog posts?