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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The Good, the Bad and How You Can Do It Better: An Analysis of 8 Great (And Not So Great) Landing Pages

In the world of business promotion and growth, landing pages have a singular purpose: to compel visitors to take a specific action that will further their engagement with your company.

Whether that action is registering for something (an event, an account, a newsletter, etc.), downloading something (a white paper, perhaps) or purchasing something, the goal is to persuade the visitor to complete that action and that action alone – not to tell them everything they could ever want to know about your company, its history and all it has to offer.

A good landing page makes it easy for visitors to understand what you want them to do and why they should do it while simultaneously keeping the process of taking that action streamlined and free of distractions and hassles.

A strong landing page is a critical component of any marketing campaign, whether offline or online. You've convinced someone to take their time to visit the page, so now you need to seal the deal by motivating them to take the next step. While this is no easy task, there are many ways to improve your odds of success.

One of the best ways to understand the dos and don’ts of landing page design is to see them in practice. Here we’ll examine eight very different landing pages and offer our analysis of what they’ve done right, what they’ve done wrong and how you can do it better.

UserTesting.com

The Good: The heading presents a direct, relevant sales message, and the subhead provides excellent support. The copy is clear and to-the-point while the video offer the opportunity for users to learn more without leaving the page.

The "Pricing and Signup" button is very prominent, so visitors know where they need to go next, while the mention of the one-year money-back guarantee provides an important trust-building element to motivate them to take that step.

The Bad: On this site, the landing page is the home page, which is a mistake because there are a number of distractions present that can draw visitors away from the path to conversion.

The navigation elements are too prominent, and the top search bar is completely unnecessary, only providing yet another element of disruption. The display image for the video is a bit cluttered as well.

How You Can Do it Better: When you have a very specific marketing or sales objective to achieve (again, think signing up for your newsletter, downloading free content, launching a new product, etc.), use a landing page.

Your home page needs to serve a diverse array of functions and users. A landing page allows you to provide a completely customized experience focused on helping a more targeted group of users reach one specific conversion point.

Team Treehouse

The Good: This landing page is clean, simple, focused and presents a clear pricing plan right off the bat. The navigation elements aren't so prominent that they distract, but they are definitely easy to find if a user wants to do more research. You know you're getting training videos, but the question remains...

The Bad: What kind of training videos? This landing page took simplicity so far to the extreme that it forgot to tell visitors what they're getting, even if they read all the text on the page. It’s impossible to understand what the offer is without leaving the page, which is a glaring oversight.

How You Can Do it Better: Minimalism is good but only when used within reason.

You must present enough information about your offer on the landing page itself for the user to feel confident in taking the next step. This requires good balance of content and design. It may also necessitate getting a bit creative in how you present your message. Often, a brief demonstration video can take the place of 1,000 words in providing more information about your product or service.

Windows Azure

The Good: Here's a fairly solid landing page. The design is minimalist, the call to action is easy to find and who doesn't like getting something for free?

The heading and description are clear and easy to understand. The superframework (where the logo and log-in links live) is sufficiently muted and out of the way. Overall, the layout is clean and makes it easy for the eye to navigate the page.

The Bad: The main navigation is messy and overly complex. There are two tiers with various buttons highlighted in light blue, which introduces and element of confusion and distraction in an otherwise very clean and streamlined design.

How You Can Do it Better: Navigation is a make-or-break element of every website design, and landing pages are no exception.

When it comes to your landing page, remember that the goal is to persuade the user to take one specific action. Focus on providing them with only the information they need in order to take that action without leaving the page if possible.

If more information is needed than will be effectively served by a single page, keep the navigation streamlined and limited only to those options that serve the landing page’s core purpose.

RightBanners!

The Good: The layout of the page is simple and easy to follow, and the navigation bar is tucked out of the way. The clear pricing structure gives users the critical information they need to know. Plus, the colors are engaging and exciting.

The Bad: The "Submit Your Order Now" heading reads like a button, but it isn't a button at all. Instead, the user must scroll down to create an order – a process that's quite confusing.

There are also too many different sizes of text on the page, which is a direct result of trying cram too much information into the banner area.

This page would work much more effectively if it were broken into a two-step process: a streamlined landing page leading the user to a second page where they could complete their order.

How You Can Do it Better: When it comes to user interface design, the devil is in the details. You must always consider the cues and conventions that users expect when interacting with a page and use those to your best advantage.

For example, navigational buttons are so commonplace that we tend to take them for granted, but they play an important role in your landing page.

Pairing call-to-action statements like “Submit Your Order Now” with a button that performs that specified action is a simple but effective way to provide a familiar interface cue that helps users understand the process that they’re engaging in.

When these things don’t work as expected – as in the example above – it creates confusion and uncertainty that can inhibit the user from taking the action you desire.

PSD2HTML

The Good: This is an excellent landing page. The call to action is clear, and the message is concise. Overall, it's easy to tell what you're getting and where to go next.

The Bad: The page is a bit cluttered, which leads the eye away from the primary point of focus.

How You Can Do it Better: As always, whitespace is your friend.

If the design is cramped, the page will seem visually intimidating to your user. By contrast, allowing the elements on the page room to breathe makes it easier for the user to draw distinctions between different types of information.

DealFuel.com

The Good: Deal Fuel pulls off the home page/landing page combo successfully because it's designed first and foremost to be a landing page.

The design is clever, and the value proposition is prominent. Navigation elements have been scaled way back to allow the header section where the call to action lives to take center stage. Pricing information is easy to find, and the layout of the page helps guide the visitor through the information presented in a logical order.

The Bad: The description paragraph is too long; it's just too much information to include in a call to action area.

Also, the color of the "Buy Now!" button should also be different than the brown used in the gas pump because it fades into the background.

How You Can Do it Better: Never underestimate the importance of color in website design. Color and contrast play a very important role in directing the user’s attention to key elements and establishing a hierarchy of information.

For example, on the DealFuel.com page, simply swapping the colors on the "Today's price" banner and the "Buy Now!" button would create better cohesiveness within the design and make the call to action button more prominent.

AppSumo

The Good: This is a unique landing page that offers a the user a chance to win a prize in exchange for giving the company their contact information.

The call to action button is impossible to miss, and the process draws you in because it's so easy to answer the (very obvious) question and fill out the form.

The Bad: The design is cluttered and the message is difficult to find right away. The heading says "Win the Top 40 Books...", but you don't know why or how immediately. The description that follows is difficult to read because there’s not enough contrast between the color of the text and the background.

Also, putting the books on the left side of the page (where the eye naturally goes first) is distracting. These should be positioned either to the right or below the call to action in this example.

It's also a mistake to offer a reward at such a superficial level of engagement. Users can provide their contact information and enter the contest without knowing anything about AppSumo or what they offer. The brand would be much better served if the page included even a short, single-line description of AppSumo's value proposition.

How You Can Do it Better: Before you create a landing page, you must clearly define the business growth objective that you want it to serve, and then you must decide how best that objective can be achieved in a way that delivers value for both your brand and your customers.

In the AppSumo example, the engagement between the visitor and the brand is fleeting and shallow. While AppSumo does gain the benefit of the user’s information, there’s nothing to qualify this user as a potential customer and no motivation for the user not to simply unsubscribe when they start receiving communication from a company that they still know nothing about.

While capturing a user’s contact information is a legitimate and useful business growth goal, it would be better achieved by offering the user something of greater value in return than simply a one-in-many-thousands chance of winning a prize.

Instead, think of a way to structure the exchange that promotes greater long-term engagement between your brand and this user, whether it’s a providing free white paper that showcases your expertise or offering a free trial of your services.

TemplateSOLD

The Good: The design is modern, and the colors are interesting and engaging. The bold, concise heading makes the purpose of the page very clear. Prices are displayed upfront, so there are no surprises when the user moves to the next step.

The Bad: What is the next step, exactly? There's no one clear call to action. Instead, there are a LOT of calls to action here that muddy the design. The page wants you both to "Signup Now" and to "Download" the themes. There are also a number of different prices displayed on the page, each of which acts as a call to action in its own right.

Last but far from least, there's a major conflict in messaging. While the bold text claims to sell $40,866 worth of themes for just $59.95, the fine print cites a 50 theme limit. This type of marketing gimmick only serves to create confusion and make potential buyers wary of what they're really getting into.

How You Can Do it Better: Whatever you do, never, ever use any kind of gimmick or trickery in your presentation. No matter what action you want your users to take, they’re not going to do it if you don’t first establish a foundation of trust.

Instead, go above and beyond in your efforts to reduce the user’s perceived risk for taking action. When possible, offer a money-back guarantee or free trial period. Make sure you address potential sales objections, and provide social proof to reinforce believability and trust.

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