9 Brainstorming Strategies for Your Blog

Blogging for Business Series Part 1

Whether you’re a coach, author, speaker, small business owner or consultant, you want to make it easy for people to find you on social media. You want to showcase your skills and let them know you’re the right person to support them.

As we all know from my previous posts, blogging is a great way to share your tips, your value, and thoughts, to help people get results with your content. It also helps to build credibility and makes it easier for people to buy from you!

I hear many business owners say, “I don’t have enough time to blog. I don’t have enough time to do my social media.” To this, I say to them “You have to ultimately help your ideal customers find you, and if time is limited, then strategic blogging for business is probably one of the fastest ways to do that.”

The thing about us entrepreneurs is that we wear many hats, so we want to minimize our efforts while maximizing your results from your blogs. This means creating content that connects and converts.

Here are 9 quick brainstorming strategies to get your creative mind flowing with ideas for your blog posts.

#1: ASK YOUR LIST

A great way to find out what your followers want to read and learn about is to send out an email to your list and ask them to fill out a three-part, one-minute survey. Not only does this give you some great blogging content, but it is actually an email strategy too because you’re literally connecting with your list and asking them, “How can I help you? How can I give you more of what you need?”

#2: GOOGLE ANALYTICS

If you already have Google Analytics set up on your website, you can go into your top content stats and take a look at:

The blog posts that most of your followers are gravitating towards.
What pages receive the most traffic on your website?
What people are searching for when they come to your website?

This is not only going to give you some great ideas for future blog posts, but also allows you to focus on the services or products your clients really need support with.

#3: CHECK YOUR EMAIL

The idea is to look at your outbox and check out the emails you’ve sent repeatedly to your customers and clients to zone in on the questions they’ve asked for support in their businesses and the challenges they are experiencing. Chances are you will find five-seven questions that are commonly being asked that you can create blog posts from.

#4: INSIGHTS

If you have a Facebook fan page, you can go to the insights section and check out the posts that got the most engagement or clicks. You’ll find that those are the topics your fans care about the most. From there you can create blogs around those areas and interests, and perhaps they’ll trigger some new ideas too.

#5: PAST CONVERSATIONS

Keep track of the various conversations that you have with both current and potential customers.

What do people ask you about?
When people see you, what do they complain about?
What do they confide in you about?

#6: SUCCESS STORIES

People love to hear the positive things happening to those you’ve supported. Success stories are easy blog posts to create. Simply think about a couple of people you’ve worked with and highlight or feature them on your website.

#7: GUEST BLOGGERS

You can also create a list of colleagues or people you refer work to that you would love to see blogging on your website.

Not only is this a great way to have new blogs featured, but when you do go live with that blog post, you can actually encourage them to promote it for you and is another way to increase traffic to your website.

#8: INTERVIEWS

Create a list of people to interview that you would love to learn from, connect with, or would inspire your audience. Why not go ahead and make a dream list too! There’s nothing wrong with thinking big and creating a list of big names that you could potentially connect with in the future.

Once you put that out into the universe, you never know who you might be able to get into your website interviews!

#9: TIPS

Think about the tips that you could, off the tip of your tongue, provide to your ideal clients. What do you regularly do in your business that would support them and make their lives easier?

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Blogging For Business Series which looks at the characteristics of a business-driven blog and titles.

SIGN UP FOR MY FREE BLOGGING MINI-COURSE, BLOGGING FOR BUSINESS!

In this course, you’ll find strategies for creating 3 months of blog posts in 30 minutes!

Besides these time-saving insights and strategies, I’ll also give you access to my swipe file with 20 fill-in-the-blank titles, five sample blog templates, a “Hot Dates” calendar and a template for planning purposes!