Blogging Inspiration, Top Blogging Ideas for Business Blogs

Even if you have the best intentions in the world, coming up with a constant stream of new ideas for blog posts can be pretty intimidating. All too soon, the corporate blog lies empty because the company has run out of ideas. Don’t let that happen to you! From company brainstorms to new ways of planning copy, we are going to provide you with some great tips on how to generate ideas for blog content.

WARNING: This is a long post, but we think it’s worth the read (and hopefully you’ll agree). If you really don’t have time then there’s a list of our top tips at the end!

Use your Colleagues

Brainstorms can be a brilliant way to come up with interesting blog ideas. Don’t limit yourself to asking only the PR or SEO teams though, invite people from across your business to contribute to a brainstorming session. They might not have the skills needed to write good content, but they may have insights and opinions that will help you generate great ideas.

Speak to your partners, colleagues, and employees, and listen to them to decide what would best suit the needs of your company. Then, come up with something you can write about which takes this on board.

You might even want to talk to some of your regular and trusted customers, to find out what they’re interested in, as there’s a good chance other potential customers will share those same interests.

Remember why you’re blogging. In the case of a corporate blog it’s usually to generate business – so put your audience first and write for them, not for your own interests. You might be delighted to finally have a platform to rave about your travels, but your corporate clients won’t care.

One key consideration is to make sure everything you write is both useful and interesting. That’s the best way to maintain a high standard for your blog.

Become a Serial Killer

Serializing your blog posts can be a great way of producing killer copy over the medium term, rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket. By producing a series of posts on the same topic, you increase the apparent relevance of your site for that subject – and give your readers some other pages to click onto.

Serial articles can help keep people interested in your blog and encourage them to return for more useful content on a relevant subject. You could consider writing a series of how-to articles, or reviews of products, industry publications, or even Twitter accounts from within your sector.

At its best, this approach can encourage readers to come back for the next instalment, creating a steady flow of visits. So, if you’re relying on serial posts to get people back to your site, you might want to stick to a regular schedule for maximum effect.

One caveat – don’t flog a subject to death. There is nothing worse than reading a series of posts which do nothing but re-iterate the same ideas over and over again. If you have nothing new to say on a topic then it’s time to find something new to write about.

Please Read.......

Simple enough to be summed up in a single word, ‘read’ is one of the best pieces of advice that can be given to any writer. The more you read other people’s blogs – even if they’re not relevant to your industry – the more you’ll understand what makes for engaging content.

You also need to read people’s blog comments and take on board what they’re saying, both on your blog and other people’s. This will help you to understand which sort of posts are good and which aren’t.

Once you’ve gained this understanding, as well as gathering some new ideas, the trick is to turn them into something that is not only engaging and entertaining, but which also meets your marketing or lead-generation needs.

Remember, it’s not just new ideas that you can pick up by reading other blogs – you might also improve your grammar and style along the way.

Invite Guest Bloggers

Consider asking an industry influencer if they’d like to contribute to your corporate blog. They are likely to be flattered, so it could be good for networking, and they will publicize it to all their Twitter followers and online circle, which can lead to some new traffic for your blog.

Just one word of warning: agree how you’ll edit their copy in advance. People can be very protective of their work and may not be happy if you’ve gone through it with a red pen. Edit their work lightly and send it back to them for approval before publishing.

Break the Rules.......

Finally, a fallback option is to go out and break all the known rules about corporate blogging. But, if you take this option, on your own head be it! Every so often you will find a corporate blog that has almost nothing to do with the company that publishes it, but focuses on something like environmental sustainability or charity work instead.

You might also see ‘corporate’ blogs that are purely for entertainment purposes, filled with jokes, or comic strips, or pictures of cats. When you’re this far outside of the box, there are very few hard and fast rules left to break, but get it right and you could give your brand a huge boost in positive perception as a result.

The only caveat to this is that it’s always wise to have plenty of plain text along with any images, info-graphics, videos, and so on. If you can get some relevant language into it then so much the better, even if it’s just ‘After a hard day working on our new landlords’ insurance document, we’ve been relaxing with some polecats. Enjoy!’

That way, even if you’re giving your visitors something fun to look at, you’re still delivering the search-visible text content that will help to get you into the search engine results.

However, I wouldn’t recommend this as a good way to write a corporate blog. Nine times out of 10 it’s not a clever quirky marketing strategy, it’s down to ego, and it brings little benefit to the business.

Five golden rules.......

Ultimately, there are just five things you need to consider when writing corporate blogs.

Your posts need to be:

-- Relevant -- Timely -- Frequent -- Personable -- Useful

These are the golden rules for great blog content so never publish anything without considering those first.

Top Blogging Tips......

If you’re still struggling for blog ideas, try some of these top tips:

1. Look at current trends, extrapolate them, and make a prediction for the future of your industry.
2. Do an introduction to 10 of the best up-and-coming bloggers in your field.
3. Find a current topic of debate and express your own, new, different view on the issue.
4. Make a list of common myths and misconceptions about your industry and then debunk them.
5. Satirise a well-known personality – it can be someone inside or outside your industry.
6. Look at a big brand, and analyse both their good and bad points – show where they’re using best practise techniques and where they’re making mistakes.
7. Find a recent piece from a high-level personality in your industry, disagree with it, and prove them and their opinions wrong.
8. Do a case study of something that went wrong in your business. Analyse the mistakes and explain how you fixed them.
9. Break some news about your company, e.g. revealing a new product.
10. Write a list of the vital web tools and software people in your industry can’t do without.
11. Compare the old and new ways of conducting your business.
12. Write an allegory about your idol doing your business e.g. “How Steve Jobs Would’ve Done SEO” or “The Bruce Lee Approach to Marketing”.
13. Go to a trade fair or industry event and report on it.
14. Do a comparison of your national market to markets abroad.
15. Review a book which deals with your industry – particularly if it contains some interesting outside the box thinking.
16. Find out about something new for your industry – a tool, a website, a method etc. – and write about it.
17. Identify industry leaders in your area and ask them to do a guest post.
18. Write a code of business ethics for your industry.
19. Conduct an interview with a prominent or rising industry figure and write it up.
20. Check Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and Quora to find out what’s most popular right now, and what questions people are seeking answers to. Then provide the information they want on your blog.

Content Marketing Tips for Website SEO Promotion

Before starting content marketing, you should have fundamental knowledge about your audience, the ways to generate great content and to use those in your websites or blogs for online visitors. For more details you may visit my older posts, but before we dig deeper into succeeding with a content marketing plan, we need to decide what success looks like. The most reliable way to do that is to define and track metrics over time. You’ll not only get a great picture of whether you’re succeeding, but knowing what works and what doesn't will help you do more of the former and less of the later.

First, let’s discuss what metrics we are talking about. At the simplest levels, we are talking about things like:

• Page views, unique visitors, pages per visit, length of visit for websites
• Followers/friends/fans and sharing for social media
• Subscribers and click-through for email

But to succeed in this online market, particularly if you need to defend a content marketing budget to C-level executives, there is more to measure. The metrics listed above are proxies, really. They may not have cost much to create, but the question is “do they return more than they cost?”

That’s why it’s important that business metrics be a part of your success equation, as well. And that means sales or subscribers or generating qualified leads.

There are four types of content marketing metrics: consumption, sharing, leads, and sales. Most marketers overvalue the first two (blog page views and re-tweets, for example) and undervalue the last two (email subscriptions from people who first read the blog and, ultimately, sales from among that group). If you focus your metrics on behavior, rather than on data aggregation, you’ll be measuring points of greater business value.

Don’t discount the importance of tracking how your consumption and sharing are changing over time, but have in mind that those measures are most relevant in relation to how they affect your business goals: this month’s email newsletter click through rate was double our norm. Did sales double that week?

You are probably one step ahead of me already, asking the question, “But how do I know if my sales increase can be attributed to my content marketing?” That can be a tough question for many of us.

It’s easy if your latest email newsletter or social media post has a link to a landing page with a “Buy Now” button on it. But for most marketers, you have to be careful in attributing conversions to your various marketing efforts even if you’re doing things like segmenting leads via gated content links on your website.

The classic example: someone clicks through to a landing page but not ready to buy. A month later, when they want to buy, they mayn’t have the URL of the landing page handy, but they remember your company name. A quick Google search lands them on your home page, and from there they initiate their purchase.

Cases like this make it important to view your metrics in relation to one another and not always individually; content marketing vs. direct mail vs. outbound telephone sales. Yes, you want to evaluate which is most effective, but you also want to leave room for the bleed between efforts that will always occur.

The most important advantage is to know how to interpret the data as important as the data itself.

Updating Low Quality Pages Improves SEO Effort of your Website

There are many websites that have recently lost Google traffic, the main cause is lots of low-quality content pages. This sort of low-quality content was probably created by some scammy SEOs in an attempt to boost search engine rankings. This was low-quality content that was naturally created with no thought of the search engines.

Impact of Low Quality Content:
Before the Google’s Panda filters, most likely, nothing. But when Google did the Panda update, some pages on some websites that were previously ignored, started to cause rankings and traffic problems for the overall website.

Contains of Low-Quality content pages:
In most cases, the low-quality content pages simply doesn’t contain much information at all. They may only have a few words or sentences outside of the global template of the page. Or they may contain information, but it’s very similar to what’s on other pages of the website. Most of the time these low-quality pages been dynamically generated by whatever content management system (CMS) the site is using. This is especially true of blog sites using WordPress or other blog software, as well as forum sites.
Let’s look at some specific types of low-quality content:

  1). Profile Pages:
Empty – Many forums, blogs or other community sites encourage people to become members. In order to do so, they have to provide information that is used to create a profile page of that person. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these, but some of them may be created with nothing more than a user name and a bunch of empty fields. So you can end up with hundreds, if not thousands, of nearly empty pages.

Spammy – Profiles have also been a target for spammers because some of them allow you to add links. Even those that don’t specifically allow links can sometimes be hacked to include a link by a smarter-than-average web spammer.

Recommended Fix: There are a few ways to deal with this. You could make profile pages invisible to anyone (including search engines) who isn’t registered and logged in. Or you could add the no index Meta tag to all profile pages. If you prefer to have your profile pages indexed, you might try to require more information than just a name so that there is a less chance of the profile seeming empty. And if you allow links, be sure they are automatically tagged with the no-follow attribute. You may also keep all profiles invisible until they go through a manual human review.

2).Empty Directory or Search Results Pages:
Websites that have a directory of sorts will often have a number of different categories. This is a great idea when there are enough items, people, or places that deserve to have their own category. But sometimes a website will get too granular in its categories and only have one (or sometimes zero) results contained within them. It’s easy to see how this creates a poor user experience, and thus a low-quality content page.

3).Tag Pages:
While adding tags to classify blog posts can make for a helpful way to browse a blog, creating an unlimited number of tags and tagging every post with a bunch of them creates tons of low-quality content tag pages. If a tag is so specific that only one post is tagged with it, the tag page itself will list only that one post. And if that post is tagged with other unique tags, a whole bunch of very similar stand-alone tag pages will be created that all just link to this one post, which means they’ve defeated the purpose of tagging as a means of categorizing posts.

Recommended Fix: Don’t use tags to stuff keywords on your pages. Instead, use them for their intended purpose by creating a limited number of them that correspond to their own unique category. This will provide an alternate way of browsing your blog, as well as more opportunities for Google to find and spider your pages.

If it’s too late to start over with your tags and you’ve already got a crazy array of meaningless tags, then add the rel=nofollow to the tag links themselves, and add the “noindex, follow” Meta tag to the resulting tag pages themselves. This way you won’t have all those duplicate pages indexed, but the search engines can still follow the links contained within them.

4). Posts That Simply Link to Something Else:
You see something interesting on another site that you want to tell your readers about, so you dash off a quick blog post that says, “Here’s an interesting article about whatever” and provide a link. Even worse is if you link to these “empty posts” from elsewhere on your site in the guise of providing actual information if they click the link. This only annoys your readers because they have to click yet again to get to what they really want to see.

Recommended Fix: A better place for quick recommendations would be to post it on your social media channels and/or link directly to the real content from elsewhere in your site where it makes sense to do so.

As you can see, whether or not you intended to have low-quality content pages on your website, you may have some anyway. Whether we agree with the way Google is handling this sort of content or not, the fact is, many sites have been negatively affected by it. Therefore you’d be smart to recheck your own site every so often for low-quality content and go through each of the recommended fixes to remove it ASAP.

Make Website more User Friendly Instead of Emphasizing on Backlinks

Making a website more user-friendly with eye-catching look and feel, proper navigation and adequate information with unique quality content is much more important than emphasizing on collecting backlinks. Although link building is a very essential process of search engine ranking algorithm considered by Google; the importance of making a website more visitors oriented can never be underestimated. There are some factors like informative and engaging content, unique quality services and attractive design which able to drive unique traffic for your website.

As the owner of a website you will obviously try hard to create a very good reputation not only for yourself but also for your organization. So it is obvious for people to believe that poor or degraded quality incoming links will lead the particular website is not good.
Also it does not seem to belong to any good neighborhoods and over time this will going to affect your websites ranking and bring it down considerably.

Some other factors which relate to this are the attractive design and appeal of the website, the arrangement and spacing of words, informative content in a particular webpage. Also the navigation and functionality of links present in different web pages or how easily a user is able to identify his answer to a particular query is also as significant.

Links coming from lower quality and free for all websites should not be a matter of concern for you as this is not the only aspect, which Google sees as a condition for judging quality of your website. If your website is attractive, user friendly and of a good structure, then you will definitely score better than others in this respect. A regularly maintained and well constructed and informative website is always appreciated by any user more than anything else.

It is always possible for any owner to not only have a website of high quality but also have back links of good quality. This is always possible in this ideal world. There always remains a concern that a user’s perception about a particular website might get affected or be negative if the user comes to know about the website from a bunch of links, which are actually full of spam.

Now it is advisable to get detached from these links coming from spammy websites. This can only be done if the poor quality links are actually manageable. You should give a try at contacting the owner of the concerned website and personally asking them to remove links pointing your website. It is however to be kept in mind that Google does not perform any such things on your behalf, also they don’t perform content management of any sort, they only perform indexing of any content found over the net.

You should not worry on this for too long because of uncooperative owner. Rather than it will be better to focus and concentrate on things which are under your direct control because as a webmaster you can hardly control links to a website. So it is better to go for website reviews from forums of webmaster, manage your content well conduct usability studies which will help you improve ranking and indexing to a great extent. Also you can take a leaf out from your competitors into what strategy they are employing and why you would visit their website more.

Finally try and remember that links of lower quality will hardly impact you in the long run but factors under your control like a website’s view, organization, and usability will always affect it positively.

Tips to Create Great Content within Minutes

As you know, content development is a complicated, time-consuming and expensive proposition. It is also very expensive for small business owners to afford that kind of effort. So they tried the new concept of micro-content, or creating small bits of marketing content within little time to blog, create videos or spend all day on Facebook.

Using the following ideas, you can develop sufficient micro-content for your social media marketing strategy devoting only few minutes a day for these activities.

Do a Proper Preparation:

Like any marketing initiative you must have a concrete idea about your strategy, selling points and targeting audience locations. Spend time thinking through a set of keywords that represent your business and your customer needs. You'll need to weave these keywords into your micro-content initiative. Once you have a complete idea of "your story," here are some content marketing options that work using few minutes a day:

1) Slideshare:

Even the most content-starved companies have PowerPoint slides. Upload your best public presentations to Slideshare for a very quick and effective way to begin populating the social web with meaningful content. Slideshare is highly indexed by the search engines and you can assign key words to every presentation. Make sure your last slide directs a viewer back to your website.

2) LinkedIn Forums:

LinkedIn is a goldmine of opportunity to create micro-content.

There are about 750,000 LinkedIn Groups covering every imaginable business interest. Go to the "search" function at the top of the page, highlight "groups" and look for a few of those have like-minded people who might be interested in you. If you are in a very specialized field, you may even consider starting your own interest group.

Now, look through the Q&A forums and get involved. Simply answering questions is providing meaningful content that can attract attention to you and your website. I have made some fantastic connections this way and acquired some great customers just by answering questions in LinkedIn Group Forums.

Make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and helpful so people can learn about you when they "click" on your profile. Depending on your industry, spending at least 15 minutes a day participating in relevant LinkedIn forums can be very profitable.

3) Networking on Twitter:

This is the ultimate site for making connections through micro-content by building a targeted audience through Twitter. It makes no sense to work on micro-content on Twitter if you have nobody listening. Here is a suggested micro-content regimen if you're just starting to tweet.

1) Create a habit of sharing Information: Today, every article, post and video has a "tweet" button. When you read something that interests you, share it on Twitter. It takes but a moment.

2) Leverage your Networks: If you have surrounded yourself with interesting people, they're providing a stream of relevant content. When you find something great, re-tweet it! You don't have to generate everything yourself. "Re-purposing" other people's content takes almost no time all.

3) Try following the "3 x 3 x 3 rule”: If you are new and trying to figure what to do, tweet three times a day, at three different times of the day, on three different subjects: a) interesting non-work-related information you saw, heard or read; b) news related to your business, market or industry (use keywords), and c) your opinion on an item in the news or something funny.

Remember that micro-content is still supposed to do the job of big content drive people to action on your website. Of course you need to include your website in your profile and use your keywords in your bio-data.

Don't be overwhelmed by the wall of noise on Twitter. Use lists to focus on your most important contacts so that your moments of daily networking are well-utilized.

4) Connecting Through Comments:

Spending 15 minutes a day commenting on relevant blog posts, videos, and Facebook pages is a quick and easy way to deliver micro-content that packs a punch. Here are some examples:

• As small business owner I advised commented on a magazine's Facebook site and was invited to send her product to the editor for coverage.
• Adding your comment to relevant YouTube viral videos can create impressions with thousands of people who are interested in a related topic.
• My comment on a popular blog post contained a link to my website which is still receiving hits nine months later. That's not unusual since posts on popular topics can have a long "shelf life."
• Comments on my blog have resulted in new business partnerships, guest blogs, and freelance assignments for my readers.
• I find that comments can carry even more impact when they’re micro or small. People will read a few sentences, but probably just scan a few paragraphs. Are there blogs that your customers enjoy? Why not contribute to this rich content with your own comments? 

5) Micro-videos:

Videos are just so hot right now but you don't have to spend thousands of dollars and precious hours in the editing booth to create great content.

Within few minutes worth of work, I had interesting content for my blog which fed my Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel, G+ stream and LinkedIn status.

6) Micro-Content and Blogging:

There are so many great benefits to blogging but this is usually the place time-starved marketers stumble. Think about re-purposing micro-content on your website as a blog, even if it only happens once a month:

• Cut and paste answers you've already provided on LinkedIn and blog comments as new, unique posts.
• Start a blog post with, you found this interesting article through a link on Twitter and share the great content from one of your tweets.
• Embed a pre-existing company video or a Slideshare presentation as an original blog post.
• Share a relevant article, video or blog post from a trade publication and simply write a few sentences commenting on it.

A blog post does not have to be a PhD thesis. Using some of these techniques, you can literally create blog posts within minutes.

Hope the above tips are very helpful for writing informative content for your business website. Feel free to send your suggestions and comments for the enhancement of this blog. You can also contact me for SEO analysis and online promotion of your business website.