Some days, it can be tough to craft yet another pithy, engaging and informative blog post. Yet maintaining your blog cadence is an important signal to search engines and readers that you are credible and worth following. While we recommend using an editorial calendar to provide the needed structure to make content publication less burdensome, not everyone is a natural planner.
If systematic, orderly and structured simply don’t fit your style, try this quick list of strategies to keep your creative inspiration flowing.
1. Leverage events: Capitalize on a recent industry event in your field. Many potential clients can’t take advantage of a full conference due to time or resources, but are interested in the subject matter. Craft a relevant post summarizing a workshop or speaker at the conference. If you offer seminars, classes or workshops, use the same approach to drill down on a key point.
2. ‘Tis the season: Seasonality can serve as inspiration for virtually any business. Fall clean-up is typically thought of as raking leaves, but it can also apply to your financial files or your social media profiles. Consider the weather, national holidays, school calendars, and seasonal events like proms, graduations, tax day, leaf peeping and summer solstice to add an entertaining theme to a post.
3. In the news: Capitalize on news that’s generating interest and use it to brainstorm ideas for a blog post. Not inspired? Explore trending topics in Twitter or top views in YouTube. One caution here — be sure that you offer a unique insight or perspective; posts that provide little new information or value can hurt your credibility and compel readers to unsubscribe to future posts.
4. Go deep in your niche: Set up weekly Google or other alerts on keyword phrases relevant to your business, and route the emails directly to a folder called “blog inspiration.” If you’re at a loss, peruse a few of the articles that use your keyword phrases and you’re sure to awaken the creative juices.
5. Follow the leaders: Maintain a list of the influential or key leaders in your niche. Subscribe to their blogs, newsletters and follow their social media posts. If you find an article which addresses a topic of your expertise, craft your own post which references theirs, and include your supporting or opposing perspective.
6. What’s good for the goose … The work you perform for one client account may spark interest by a potential client in a similar field. Share relatable elements of a recent client project (be sure to get client permission to share, or change any identifying details), identifying the client need or challenge and how the client benefitted.
7. Recycle: Repurpose one of your past email newsletter topics or blog posts to provide a fresh perspective. Or expand on a topic you posted about on social media. New trends can provide an opportunity to revisit previously published content with a fresh perspective.
Don’t depend on creative inspiration every week. “Bank” a few posts for when “life happens” — or creativity doesn’t.
We welcome your input. Please share your creative ways to come up with ideas for your blog topics.
I never thought of using a google alert for this purpose. Pretty cool idea.
Thanks Mike!
I never thought of doing a blog post to summarize an event, but it’s a great idea. There are so many industry meetings and events that I wish I could attend but obviously you can’t attend all of them. It’s also a great way to show that you are “in the know.” I’m going to schedule myself for a workshop so I can use this tactic soon. Thank you!
Great to hear, Rob! You can even summarize something you learn in a webinar. Just be sure to credit the source.
It is challenging to think of ideas to keep active on my blog. Some of these ideas I’ve heard of before but others do help – like #7. Can you explain more what you mean by Google or other alerts in #4? Thank you.
Happy to explain. A Google alert (or one in any search engine) is a way to stay abreast of online mentions of a particular topic without having to do continual searches. First, you select a term or phrase that is relevant to your industry and a potential topic of interest. By creating an alert, you will receive digest emails with links to mentions of the specified term. The links may be news articles, blog posts, websites, videos, etc. You can then explore those links for creative inspiration. To establish an alert, go to Google.com/alerts. In the form that appears, add your term in the “search query” box. Change frequency from “daily” to “weekly” and add your email address in the “deliver to” box.