Has Your Blog Run Dry? Try This.

Marketers will tell you (and they should) that the more valuable content you publish to your website, the better your web traffic and general online visibility will be. If you want to be a thought leader, start a blog.

The problem is that once you launch your blog you then have to write in it at least once a week for the rest of your foreseeable life. And it’s flat out hard to write interesting articles all of the time.

Different writers have different remedies for this problem, but what I’ve done recently is used a nifty ebook titled 103 Ways to Create Sharp Blog Content. The book, authored by Sara Lancaster of the web marketing agency No. 2 Pen, serves as a rapid idea generator. It’s a list of ideas for writing blog posts, split into easy-to-skim sections.

Here are a few of my favorites ideas:

Profile your work and your clients – This is something that we really don’t do enough of at Hinge, but we should! Showing, rather than telling, your readers how things are done can be much more engaging.

Repurpose newsletters, press releases, and white papers – Not enough companies take advantage of the repurposing strategy. Not everything you publish has to be written from scratch. Try breaking up some of your longer pieces into digestible blogs posts.

Make something unrelatable relate – This is a fun one, although easier said than done. I realized how difficult this could be when I compared Michelangelo to an online marketing consultant.

Use Google’s Adwords tool – Why guess what people want to read about when you can know for sure? Use this tool to see how many people are searching Google for a given keyword phrase.

Drink with a friend – A few glasses of cabernet will bring out the best in anyone’s writing… right?

I encourage you to download the book (no registration required) and keep it handy for those periods of blog writer's block. And if you have any doubts about the importance of content marketing, join Lee Frederiksen and me for our next webinar on Content Marketing for Professional Services. It’s coming up next week!