The key practices of owning and operating a written (or video) blog are (1) keeping content relative, (2) keeping content informative, (3) ensuring that, once the blog is launched, blog content is frequently posted. The first two practices will guide you through your first blog post, but the last of these three steps can quickly become a hardest qualifier to meet, especially at the professional level.
When you are responsible for a blog, you are obligated to conceive at least one publishable idea per week. These ideas translate into blocks of text that ultimately draw clientele deeper into the inner workings of your company. As such, they should be interesting, useful, and easily compressible. But as with any creative position, you may eventually find yourself up against a deadline and locked in a battle with writer’s block. So, where do marketable ideas come from? What are you to do when posting day rolls around on the calendar, and you’re fresh out of ideas for the blog?
To start, you must understand that every idea begins with inspiration. That being said, inspiration doesn’t always work around your schedule. You should never wait until the day of (or even the day before) the blog post to begin trying to conceive of an idea for that blog. The first tip we can offer to help you with frequent idea generation is to keep your ear to the ground all week, to take notes on what is happening in the world around you, and to start compiling data on your topic up to three days in advance of your blog post.
Regardless of your profession, your degree of experience with social media, or the expectations that you (or your employer) may have for your blog content, there is always a limitless amount of interesting, insightful information out there that will suit your content needs. It is ripe for formal adaptation and development, but it won’t always take the form of low-hanging fruit for you to grab within a few hours of your post. It’s important to be aware of what’s happening around you, and to take notes each and every day on what might one day be interesting blog content.
This leads into our next tip, which is to always stay two steps ahead of yourself. For every one blog post, there should have been three or more ideas for a blog post. Though they may not be developed into blogs on the very day of their conception, these ideas can be filed and saved for future blogs. A proper blogger will have a list of ideas for future blogs mounted to his/her desktop; a nest of creative content waiting to be formally crafted.
Tip number three is to build on what already exists. As you’re looking and listening for the relative hot topics to blog about, remember, that there is no shame in adapting or building on a pre-existing blog post that you or somebody else has previously made. Inspiration is rarely self-contained, and fairly often drawn from another person’s contributions. Our own blog post today is inspired by a blog post from the social media gurus at buffer, which was further inspired from yet another source. Progress is achieved through the combined efforts of likeminded individuals, each taking the previous mind’s existing body of work just a single step further. This is true of rocket science, and it is true of blogs.
Finally, we implore you to utilize the age-old tactic of ‘thinking outside the box’. Blog posts are not exclusively useful for keeping your audience updated on your company progress. Blog posts should also push people to be insightful and creative. As your blog was inspired, it should also inspire others. In the long term, this will draw more traffic to your blog, merit more views to your company website, and result in a larger profit margin overall. But in the short term, it will help others to better understand and benefit from the digital ‘think tank’ of information in the web.
At Render Perfect, we make habit of leading by example. Our blog content is formulated, written, reviewed, and re-written before it ever reaches syndication. But before any of that comes the idea. Each and every blog starts with an idea, and each and every idea is inspired by something that we have seen, heard, or experienced, and want to share with you. Find your inspiration wherever you can, and use it to your advantage.
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