One of the most common concerns small businesses have about starting a blog for their business is the task of writing regular blog posts.
- Where will the ideas come from?
- When will I have time?
- What will I write about?
Ideas are all around you each and every day. If you write about common everyday things such as a question from a customer, an experience on a project, an observation from your desk or an email you receive, the ideas will turn into great articles. Your customers DO want to read about these things, because they often address questions they are afraid to ask, observations they have made as well, and insight into doing business with you. You are an expert in your specific industry, and your customers trust what you have to say!
There are several methods that work great for capturing your ideas that pop into your head at inopportune times, and turning your ideas into great articles.
- Remember those small spiral-bound Mead Memo Pads? They are cheap and fit into your pocket, purse, or the cup holder of your car. Keep a memo pad with you at all times and scribble your ideas down to refer to later. One blogger I know uses her memo pad religiously and NEVER forgets an article idea.
- Another option is using sticky notes. Choose a specific color for your blog post ideas and keep a pad at work, home, and in the car. Jot down quick ideas and stick them where they won’t get lost. When you sit down to write, look for your color-coded sticky notes with ample ideas. If you need to, stick them to the computer, TV, your brief case, or where ever you know you’ll find them.
- Feeling particularly full of ideas? Write them down in a brainstorm list. I have certain times when I get tons of ideas floating into my head, so I write them in a brainstorm list. For me, key times are during business meetings when important, interesting, and inspiring topics come up. Another time I get inspired with blog post ideas is when I am reading books or magazines. I’ve been known to rip a page from a magazine I’m reading to serve as a reminder of what I want to write about. I simply set it on my desk.
- Keep a clearly labeled folder of ideas near your computer. Slot ideas in the folder. I get ideas from junk mail, advertisements, newspaper articles, magazines, and even things my kids have written, said, or drawn. It’s great to flip through your file for article ideas when you are ready to write.
- WordPress offers the option of draft blog posts. Feeling particularly inspired or have some time on your hands right now? Write a few blog posts and save them for later.
Anyone can write great articles for blog posts, and every business should consider adding a blog to your marketing mix. The information, relationships, and business growth that result from blogs are priceless.
I am President and Chief Evangelist for Vivid Image - a web design and social marketing firm located outside of Minneapolis, MN. 
Boy, this post really hit a sore spot for me. In fact it likely generated a blog post for me on whether I can succeed at my current commitment level.
Here is my problem. I am an engineer. I never really like to write much or thought I was very good at it. Now I write to make sure people can find me in the clutter of consultants and people on the Internet. I write a blog , a column for an online magazine(bi-monthly), a book review (monthly), a column for an online newsletter (monthly), and two other blogs are asking me to be a contributing author(occasional). They are all important for me to be recognized as an expert resource in my area of expertise.
How do you make it all work for the right exposure?
Another question is how best to leverage one or two volumes of work to feed the others?
What is the correct % difference that one article has to be from another one posted for the search engines not to see it as a duplicate?
If its the exact same info, does it help or hurt you and how?
Can anyone help? I hope to make some progress and actually sleep some nights instead of writing.
Hi Wendy,
Great comment and questions. Thanks for taking the time to read and respond. Your comments gave me several ideas to write future articles. With my background in search engine optimization, I am fascinated with the explosion of blog articles in the traditional ranking mix. I have it on my “to do” list to study social network focused search engines like Bing, yet I need to carve out time to do this. So much of it is still so new, that I am convinced most SEO people and blog gurus are still finding out “what happens if you do this”. From what I know about SEO and my personal view on blog content, I do not think it hurts you to allow the same article to be published on another website with or without a link back to your site. Obviously from an SEO stand point it is best if your article “guest appears” on a website that is complimentary in subject matter. For example, an article about the fantastic invention of WordPress won’t do much SEO help to appear on a website about Alternative Medicine. Unless the two subjects are merged into one article to discuss the benefits of using wordpress to further the cause of alternative medicine.
Another technique is to partial post. Meaning you write the whole article, but use a portion of it, 10 “steps” or other ways to publish part of the article in other newsletter or guest post committments. You can link back to your blog for the full article or reduce writing responsibility by publishing your article in a series of posts stretched out over time. From an SEO stand point, this would be beneficial.
You would not want to repost the exact same article on your own website multiple times. If there is a need to update an article or add addendums, I would either modify the original post or link a newer post to the older one. Doing this should not hurt your SEO, unless you modify the original URL/page name of a blog post that has done well in search engine rankings. Tread lightly on altering any URL’s after a post has been published.
As far as modifying or repurposing articles, it is important to understnd what a crawler sees when scanning your site. All search engines are different and no one knows exactly how Google decides to list something really high or decide it’s spam. We do know that crawlers skip over non-essential words, focusing in on keywords and phrases. If an article is keyword “stuffed” a crawler can tell because it will have too high%ratio to the non-essential words. Therefore, most blog posts written for the purpose of discussing a topic and communicating with people don’t run the risk of being considered spam by search engines. If you are repurposing an article, consider the number of keywords phrases and where they are placed in your article. You’ll want to change things up a bit, however, I don’t see how this would be very beneficial to your subscribers who would have probably read the “original” version.
Do you use Google Analytics? It would be good to take a look at where your traffic is coming from, what kind of referrals you get from search engines. and the phrases people are using to find your site. Make sure to add tags to all your posts.
I certainly hope you are able to get some sleep too!
Beth