Like most people who maintain a personal or professional blog, I spend a lot of time pondering, “What the heck am I going to write about this week?” No, I don’t actually use the word heck. Yes, I have an editorial calendar. Yes, I follow it about 50% of the time. But, some weeks, the topic I planned on leads me to a dead end. Other weeks, I don’t have adequate brain power left over to write about web analytics. (But I’ll get to it, I swear.)
I keep quite a few articles and blog posts bookmarked to help me generate ideas. Then, last week, I realized all of our posts fall under one, sometimes more, of four broad categories. Don’t get me wrong—I love all the 100 Great Blog Content Ideas posts out there. But, being a big picture kind of gal, tying these back to larger questions really helped me. With this discovery, I saw countless possibilities. Here are the categories:
1.) Who are we?
-What are we involved with/what do we support in the community?
-What do we believe, read, listen to, watch, attend?
-What’s it like to work for our company?
-What inspires us?
2.) What do we do?
-What questions are we asked by our clients? By our colleagues?
-Which of our completed projects could serve as teachable examples?
-What questions do we want answered ourselves? What have we been meaning to learn more about? (LOTS of our posts fall under this category.)
-What’s our take on the hottest topics in our industry?
-What predictions do we have about our industry?
3.) How do we do business?
-What processes/tools do we use?
-What do we do differently than our competitors?
-What do our clients/colleagues have to say about our work?
-What honors have we been lucky enough to receive because of our work?
-What have our mistakes taught us?
4.) Who do we work with?
-Which of our clients/partners deserve recognition?
-What’s happening in our local/regional business community?
-Who do we need to thank?
As you can see, in several years of blogging, we still haven’t completely covered all of these questions. The fun part is dreaming up new and interesting ways to answer these bigger questions. How do you decide what to write about? We’d love to hear how you generate blogging ideas. And, we’re always excited to help you out if you’re not sure how to get started or if you get stuck along the way.