Writer’s Block Be Gone! 9 Sources to Mine for Endless Blogging Ideas

“Content is king!” is the chief mantra of today’s marketing. And in the king’s service, many a business has begun blogging with fervor, only to have those efforts languish a few weeks or months later as the novelty wears off before the long-term benefits kick in. The challenge facing any business blogger is not only to produce top-quality content that people will love and share but also to establish a regular rhythm of publishing new content over time in order to build a following and develop a community around the brand. Perhaps you’re a sole proprietor – and therefore a solo blogger – juggling too many responsibilities and too little time. Or maybe you’ve been handed the torch of managing your company’s blog, and you have no clue where to begin. Perhaps you’ve been blogging for your company for some time now and are starting to feel the well of inspiration running dry. Wherever you currently stand on the blogging spectrum, don’t give up. Great content ideas are all around you; you just have to know where to look to find them.

Here are nine reliable sources you can always turn to whenever you need inspiration for that next great post:

1. Your company documents

In the course of doing business, your company cranks out tons of documents. While many of these might seem boring or commonplace, there are seeds of inspiration to be found if you look hard enough. Has someone from your company recently given a presentation at a conference or hosted a webinar? Find a way to mold the content into article form, and embed a video or audio recording (if available) for those who’d prefer to watch or listen rather than read. Has your company published an ebook or whitepaper? You’re in luck! Take that content and break it down into bite-sized snippets for near-ready-made posts. Even the most mundane documents can yield surprising gems. Your company’s annual report, for example, probably highlights the past year’s major accomplishments. Seek out the individuals responsible and interview them about the process of reaching those milestones. Ask them to share lessons learned along the way and advice that would be helpful to others (without giving away any trade secrets, of course). Transcribe your sessions and – just like that – you can check another blog post off your list.

2. Your coworkers

Every person within your organization brings a unique set of skills, experience, interests and expertise to the table. Tap into that brain trust to keep your blog humming with an interesting and diverse array of content. Recruit your coworkers to write posts inspired by their own particular strengths and areas of expertise. Different minds think differently, so you’ll likely discover that they’ll explore ideas that might never have occurred to you. Plus – as a bonus – having many voices and perspectives represented on your company’s blog will only make it that much more useful and appealing to readers.

3. Your customers

If you’re doing your job right, your customers are your blog’s readers. But they can also be an invaluable source of its content as well. After all, who’s better qualified to share creative and practical ideas for how your products or services can be used to make someone’s life (or business) better, easier, richer or more efficient? For example, Evernote regularly features customer interviews on its corporate blog as a way to tout the limitless possibilities its suite of apps offers for personal organization and productivity. Within each post, Evernote includes screen shots from the featured customer to demonstrate the software in action. The firm has even taken this approach one giant leap further, recruiting their best customers as brand ambassadors in areas relative to their particular expertise. For example, they’ve instituted a food blogger as their Home Cooking Ambassador, a workout guru as their Fitness Ambassador and a personal tech expert as their Parenting Ambassador.

4. Studies, surveys and polls

If there’s one thing we’ll never be lacking in today’s information age, it’s data. Every day, new research is being published on any number of topics. Find a recent study that’s relevant to your audience and digest what the results mean for them in practical terms. Do the numbers indicate a shift in trends? If so, how should your readers adapt their approach to stay ahead of the curve? Does the research suggest that the status quo is here to stay? If so, how can your readers respond to make the most of a proven winner?

5. News headlines and pop culture trends

A sure way to spice up any blog post is to find a tie-in to current news headlines and pop culture trends. The trick is to take two seemingly unrelated concepts – such as comedian Louis C.K. and customer service – and create an analogy that brings them together in a way that offers a fresh perspective on a topic that’s been covered countless times before. Whether it’s The Amazing Spider-Man or the Olympics, Tom Cruise or the presidential election, by linking subject matter that may seem either unfamiliar or unoriginal to something very familiar and timely, suddenly your topic – no matter what it is – becomes much more relatable and of the moment to your reader.

6. The calendar

Life – and business even more so – is cyclical. With every year comes tax season, summer vacation, the holiday rush and the lull that follows, a new year and new budgets...you get the idea. Think critically about what types of challenges each season brings for your readers, and write timely posts centered around useful tips and advice to help them through.

7. Your own blog

Just because you’ve written about a certain topic before doesn’t mean it’s off the table now. There’s always more to say or a different angle to explore. Perhaps the original was an entry-level, 101-style post. Now it’s time to delve deeper to help those readers who’ve mastered the basics and are ready to learn more. Perhaps enough time has passed since the previous post that new research has been released on the topic, or industry trends have shifted in a different direction. Revisit the topic and bring your readers up to speed on the latest developments.

8. Other blogs

You never have enough time in the day. Guess what? Neither do your readers. Sometimes the best way to solve both of these problems is not to create new content but to curate the great content that already exists. What does that mean? It means aggregating the best, most useful posts that you’ve found in your travels across the Web into a single post (giving due credit to the original sources, of course). This type of article can be organized either around a central theme (e.g. “Pinterest: 10 Articles to Help You Get Started”) or by timeframe (e.g., a “Week in Review” round-up of your favorite articles from the past seven days). Either way, you’ve done your readers a great service by sparing them the time to cull through all the riffraff to get to the good stuff, and you’ve published another great post that required minimal time and effort to compose.

9. You

We began with one mantra, so let’s finish with another: “Write what you know.” The best source of blogging inspiration will always be your own life experience. Readers engage more with true-to-life stories of obstacles overcome or goals achieved. Generally, if something triggers an emotional response from you – whether it’s excitement, anxiety, frustration or curiosity – you’re likely not the only one who’s encountered this situation or felt this way, which means it’s worth considering how to spin the event into a relevant article for your company’s blog. Also, you can harness personal challenges to put yourself in the shoes of your readers. For example, this article was inspired by my own strategizing process for a new company blog – how would I keep the content flowing when the obvious ran out? Keep in mind, too, that there are certain basic building blocks of life and of business that are universal. Every person who owns a business, for example, has to figure out how to win new customers, what they can do to grow their market share, the best way to manage employees and company resources, etc. If your target readers are business owners and entrepreneurs, any wisdom you have to offer in these areas based on your own personal experience will be appreciated. And don’t be afraid to share your failures as well as your successes; both offer equally valuable lessons for your readers. To make the most of life’s inspirational moments, practice actively paying attention to the events of your day-to-day routines. Keep a running log of content ideas – whether it’s in a physical notebook or just a simple text file that lives on your desktop. As you go through your day, write down every minor annoyance and small victory. Doing so will help train your mind to be aware, and soon you’ll discover that you’re finding blogging inspiration in even the most unexpected places.

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In It to Pin It: 8 Ways to Win New Customers with Pinterest

A Pinterest-ing development in social media

The results are in and they’re rather stunning: Pinterest is now the third largest social network in the U.S., right behind Facebook and Twitter (Google+ who?). Moreover, a recent study by BlogHer showed that women trust recommendations from Pinterest more than any other platform. Not too shabby for a network that’s barely two years old and still in an invite-only open beta phase.

The basic mechanics of the site are simple. Members (known as “Pinners”) can establish a profile and “pin” all the cool, funny, trendy and inspirational things that they find in their online travels to digital bulletin boards, where images (and their associated links) are bookmarked. Pinners use these boards to visually document anything and everything pertaining to their interests, whether those interests entail fashion, home décor, food, parenting, wedding planning, tech gadgets or cars.

As you’d expect from any social network, pinners can follow each other. They can also “repin” other users’ images as well as like or comment on pins. Naturally, there’s also integration with the other Big Two, with the option to share links to pins on Facebook and Twitter.

More interesting is the question of why the site has caught fire so quickly. The primary reason lies in its anatomy. True to its name, Pinterest creates a highly streamlined experience for its users that is curated according to their interests. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, where users have to sift through every photo and status update from those they follow in a linear fashion, Pinterest users can focus solely on their hobbies without their feeds being cluttered with information that holds no value to them.

The most important question, of course, is how you can harness the power of this explosive new social network to grow your business. To answer that question, here are eight ways you can use Pinterest to win over new customers and fans:

1. Tap into what people love.

Before you dive in, take some time to study the ecosystem and how its members interact. One of the greatest advantages of Pinterest from a marketing perspective is that the community is very open, so it’s easy to see who’s influential in a certain area of interest and what types of content generate the most repins and comments.

By monitoring these trends, you can identify where the best opportunities lie for your brand to create the kind of content that your customers crave.

2. Focus on values, not products.

Think your brand isn’t a good match for an image-driven platform? Don’t be too quick to dismiss your Pinterest potential. Plenty of brands that don’t seem like the most obvious fit for Pinterest – from GE to Kotex – have found creative ways to leverage the platform to engage with customers.

The key is focusing not on your products or services but on the core values that define your brand. Organize your boards around these pillars of your brand and share things there that anyone who shares that common interest or passion would enjoy. Make sure to offer a healthy balance of content that includes your products where relevant but also great stuff from across the Web as well as repins from other users.

Whole Foods Market, for example, has quickly emerged as a Pinterest rock star using this approach. The company’s core values include caring about the community and the environment, promoting healthy eating habits and providing education about good nutrition. Drawing upon these values, they’ve created a diverse collection of boards –ranging from “Who Wants Dinner?” to “Winter Entertaining” to “Super HOT Kitchens” to “We’re Used to Reusing” – where they share content from a wide array of sources that collectively represents the Whole Foods lifestyle.

3. Tell a story in pictures.

Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Pinterest is image-based rather than message-based – which is one of the key reasons for its success. When users scroll through feeds or boards, they’re presented with a simple, uncluttered interface that includes a stream of pictures interrupted just slightly by a brief caption below. As a result, to be successful, it’s important to ensure that the images you pin to your boards tell the story of the content they represent in a visually compelling way.

For example, if you want to share a link to a post from your blog on Pinterest, you need to make sure it includes a powerful image that encapsulates its key theme or message and is also intriguing enough to prompt someone to click through to see the full story.

Keep in mind, too, that when followers re-pin your images, they can change the caption. As a result, it’s important that the images you pin can stand on their own outside the context of your brand’s boards so that they continue to convey your message and values as they are repinned from one board to another.

4. Be a participant, not just a contributor.

Creating boards that offer great curated content organized around your customers’ interests is a good first step. But as with any social network, to get the most out of your presence on Pinterest, you must also listen and engage, not just broadcast.

Repinning other users’ content to your brand’s boards demonstrates that you’re there to do more than push your own agenda by elevating those who have something interesting to offer on your topics of interest. Likewise, following other users’ boards and commenting on others’ pins is an effective relationship-building tactic that can draw new eyes (and potential new customers) to your own boards.

5. Let your customers create content for you.

Pinterest makes it easy to crowdsource content. All you have to do is create group pinboards and invite other users to pin content to those boards – a great way to spark engagement with your brand.

You can also use group pinboards as a springboard for contests where you ask customers to pin pictures of themselves using your products, with prizes for the most creative, innovative or inspiring images. It’s a win-win strategy for both your brand and your customers, as your customers can enjoy a turn in the spotlight while you can promote your products in a tasteful way that’s very palatable to the community.

6. Diversify your boards.

Another element that differentiates Pinterest from Facebook and Twitter is that users have the option to follow specific boards in addition to following users. This means that a user may elect to follow just one or two of your boards rather than everything you post.

While this may initially seem like a disadvantage to you, it’s actually a benefit. Why? Because it means you don’t have to worry about limiting your content to only that which offers the broadest appeal. Instead, you can tailor each board to fit a specialized interest.

Returning to our Whole Foods example, each of their boards is tailored to a fairly narrow area of interest, whether that’s recipes, seasonal entertaining, home décor, DIY projects, gadgets or books. While all of these boards may not appeal to every Whole Foods customer, by providing such a wide array of boards, the brand has greatly increased its chances that every customer can find something that resonates with their interests.

7. Make sure your great content can be found.

If you’re investing the resources required to create and curate interesting content, you want to make sure it can be found by the greatest possible number of customers and potential customers, right? The good news here is that there are tactics you can use to boost your odds.

First, just like Twitter, Pinterest supports hashtags. Tagging each image with the central idea or theme of your board will increase its chances of being found in search. Additionally, the sharing tools built into Pinterest automatically pick up these hashtags and include them when users share your content on Facebook and Twitter.

Also, make sure when possible to form the name of your boards around keywords. For example, West Elm offers home décor boards organized around specific color palettes (“Coral,” “Aquamarine”) and patterns (“Stripes,” “Chevrons”). By naming their boards according to these keywords, West Elm helps lead users who are looking for decorating ideas focused on that color to their boards.

8. Turn pins into traffic.

Don’t overlook the opportunity to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your website. If you pin cool imagery and interesting content from your site to your boards, you’re basically seeding Pinterest with a lot of links back to your site.

You can also add the “Pin It” button to your site right next to your other social sharing buttons in order to make it as easy as possible for visitors to add images from your site directly to their boards.

And if something either you or one of your customers pins happens to become incredibly popular? Think of all the potential clicks back to your site!

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