Keep Them Coming #1: Ideas for Blog Posts

Reading Liz Strauss's Successful & Outstanding Bloggers, a great resource for bloggers, I was directed to Sonia Simone's post on SlowBlogging which, as is the way with blogs, led me to Mara Rogers's post on SpeedBlogging. Both of these pieces address, in part, the challenge of coming up with ideas for posts week after week. This is an issue for all steady bloggers, so I have put together my thoughts on the subject, which I will publish in three posts over the next few months.

For starters, here are ten ways to maintain a steady flow of ideas for posts

1. Keep a List

Both Simone and Rogers make this point and I only repeat it because it is essential. Ideas for posts don't necessarily come to you when you have time to write; they come in reaction to some stimulus during your day. If you don't write them down when they come to you, you will forget half of them. When you do sit down to write, you can pick a subject from your list that fits your need and mood. My list now runs to five pages with two thirds of the ideas used up and crossed off. About half the remaining entries don't look like such good ideas any more, so I'm due for a list extension session.

2. Listen to Your Clients

Business bloggers write to reach their clients and so seek to write things of interest to that audience. Logically, this means your clients are the best source of information on what to write about. They are. The majority of ideas for my posts come from clients. I try to get at least one idea from each client meeting. Clients' questions, doubts, observations, opinions, stories, boasts and complaints all provide potential grist for a post. But you have to be listening.

3. Listen to Your Readers

You also write for your readers, clients or not. Look at comments as sources of ideas. This is just one reason for establishing a dialogue with your readers. An increasing number of the Rainmaking Problem posts come from this source. They come buried in the comments to the Rainmaking Problem posts, and now there is also a noticeable flow of questions coming by email, the author's offering the use of their question as a subject for a post. I believe that if I didn't listen to my readers and encourage them, both the comments and the questions would dry up.

4. Reflect

Spend twenty minutes with your list in front of you thinking of ideas. For some reason ideas seem to come to me in spurts. I will have five or six ideas in quick succession and then none for several days. I doubt I am unique in this. When ideas start to flow, take ten minutes and see how many you can come up with.

5. Organize Your Thinking

Anything you do to organize your thoughts tends to throw off ideas for posts. It can be an outline, typology, mind map, ranking or some other organizing vehicle. The organization, itself, may be bloggable and so may be individual elements. So whenever you engage in thought organizing, recognize that post ideas will be a byproduct. I am currently preparing a new training program which has generated several good ideas.

6. Look for Gaps

Any point in your conversations or writing that you tend to brush over for lack of a clear understanding is worth at least considering as a subject for a post. Writing about it will force you to clarify your own thinking, a major benefit of blogging. Listen for conversational ellipses, such as ... and that eventually lead to (exactly how?) ... or ... as an outgrowth of (again, how?) ... or ... surprisingly (then, why does it happen?).... This amounts to listening for the dog that doesn't bark and takes some practice, but can be remarkably productive, once you get the knack of it.

7. Jot Notes as You Write

Writing, itself, tends to stimulate your thinking. As you write posts, emails and reports, jot down the ideas that come to you. Edit out a paragraph, because it doesn't quite fit? Ask yourself if it might work as a post. Have one more example of an idea than you need? Maybe it's the start of a post. Ask yourself if an email might have a second life as a post, if you rewrite it for a broader audience.

8. Drill Down or Step Back

Going into detail on a point you make briefly in a broader argument can generate a post. Who's in Your Audience? drills down on how to learn who is in your audience when you present at a conference. Alternatively, you can take a small idea and place it in a larger context. The post, What Does It Mean to Prepare for a Sales Meeting, shows that what many professionals do to prepare doesn't make sense, if you step back and put it in the context of how clients decide whom to hire.

9. Note the Little Points

Most professionals have little points that they make to their clients repeatedly. Little points are perfect for posts, because they lend themselves to brevity. For years I have advised clients that there are no extra points for doing business development the hard way. That simple but overlooked truth became the title for a popular post.

10. Build on a Theme

An idea for one post may contain a theme for several. No extra points became a theme for two more posts (No Extra Points for Originality a and No Extra Points for Doing Business Development an Unpleasant Way). Another theme that has sprung from a single post is A Lesson From (Maurie, Dick, Edwin, Charlie and Joe), a series which captures lessons I have learned from others over the years. Readers like themes, which provide continuity among posts as a balance to variety.

Future posts on the Keep Them Coming: Ideas for Blog Posts theme will appear roughly one and two months from today and will address: