I was talking with a colleague earlier today and we were discussing blogging, marketing and how to engage with your customers and with more customers.
I’m a great believer in blogging being a really powerful marketing tool. (I’ve written about blogging and marketing here before in Inbound marketing – it’s new and it’s hard but we must get better at it and Content Marketing: Create, Repurpose, Recycle, Curate). However, we agreed that many businesses find blogging quite a bit of a struggle as they very quickly run out of things to write about and ways to say what they want to say.
As a few ways of getting started finding and creating great content for your blog, here’s some of the tools and methods that I use.
- Use Google Alerts. If you go to: Google.com/alerts, you can type in any subject or topic or area that you’re interested in and Google will send you alerts that are news, industry or blog based when new content is published or they find material that fits what you are interested in. This is a great way to find, comment on and share information that readers of your blog or your niche will find useful and interesting. It’s free too.
- Bookmarking Sites like Delicious.com or Digg.com can be really helpful in finding interesting stories that are relevant to your niche.
- Clipping. Related to number two is clipping. I find that when I see things in a newspaper or magazine then I’ll generally tear out the article that caught my eye and put it in my notebook so that I can write about it later. I do the same online but use an application called Evernote.com to ‘clip’ pages and articles that I find online so that I can return to them later when I am on or offline.
- Guest posting. It’s a myth that you need to create all of your content yourself and so guest posting ie. asking someone else like one of your customers or one of your suppliers to write a piece or a series of posts for you can be a great way to add different perspectives, voices and personalities to your blog. However, a few things that you should keep in mind are:
- It is your blog so always be clear about what you want them to write about (or get them to come up with ideas that they think could fit with your blog and then agree a topic); and
- Remember, it is your blog so never publish anything that you are not happy with.
- Interviews. Whether in text-based question and answer format or audio or video format, interviews are great ways to share different stories and perspectives from your employees, customers or suppliers and are great ways for people visiting your blog to get to know the real and personal side to your business.
- Other experts. You will obviously be an expert in your own field, right? But, I bet you don’t know everything, right? Therefore, keeping in touch with other players and experts in your field whether it is by subscribing to their blog or their newsletter is another great way to find new ideas and perspectives on things to write about.
These are six ways that I use to help me generate content for my own and this blog. What others do you use that I can learn from you?
Blogs are a great source of information, especially for small business & home businesses. So many bloggers share their vast knowledge and experience with us all online and for free. Many of these blogs have become an invaluable source of information and insight. Lately however, I noticed a trend that makes it almost impossible to use some of my favourite blogs because of the amount of advertising and the way the advertising is intermingled with the real blog content.
Darling Brown: " That'll be £30,000.00 Please – Each!"
Here is the staggering truths, how our Darling-Brown dream team – nightmare team – paid out $2.4 trillion of our tax-money on the UK bail-out, or should I say the UK bank bail out.
We all remember the Darling Brown spin:
… and so on. Well here are the facts:
These numbers show that the UK is the worst affected country world-wide by a almost 4:1 margin.
How some of the money was spend:
TOTAL of over £1.5 trillion directly into banks – unbelievable, staggering – who has been made responsible for this mess?
The government has “borrowed” this money. National debt:
More than half of the spending on the NHS will be just interest payments to cover the national debt and equal to the education budget.
Between 2007 and 2008 our loss in personal wealth has been £31,000 per household. The effects of “quantitive easing” and the unprecedented loss in the value of the £, will increase the pressure on our personal wealth even further.
The effect on all of us, not only Jeremy Clarkson, will be felt for decades to come, our pensions, house prices, the ability to buy foreign goods, travel & holiday – will all be impacted by these follies of a few, including our current government.
How to move forward? What we need is more self-employed, small businesses, home businesses. We need people who understand what it mean to make money. People who understand and care enough to realize when we are being lied too and given the famous Labour spin.
The banks enjoy a special status in our society, they should not be allowed to abuse this status. If they do they need to be asked to repay the damage that they have caused. Not only the loans that they were given, but also all the damage they have caused us personally with their reckless behavior.
If you and I go out and cause reckless damage, we will be ordered by a court to pay for the damage. What is happening here? All the talk is about remuneration for bankers, profits in Q3 and so on. The banks should not make a profit until they paid for the damage they have caused us all.
As for this government, I have no words for the unbelievable spin and deceit of the British population. – ST.
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