Random musings: How to Generate Endless Blog Topics #TBT

Today's blog post was originally published 3 years ago:

I met Andy McClure of Sherpa Business Development about 3 years ago at Regus in San Ramon (I believe). Andy gave a presentation there, I don't remember the subject but the important thing is that I remember him and his company...thanks to the emails he sends and the posts he makes on LinkedIn.

I don't always read his emails, or posts on LinkedIn, but this particular one, "How to Generate Endless Blog Topics" caught my eye, since I'm always looking for topics for my blog.

Heres' an excerpt from Andy's blog post:

So how can we keep coming up with new ideas every week? Here’s one way to help you generate blog topic ideas. Let’s call it the multi-hub and spoke blog topic machine. Or you can just call it the answer to your empty piece of paper with “blog post topics” written across the top.

First step: down the left side of a piece of paper make a list of questions your ideal clients are likely to have, that are related to the problems you and your business can resolve. Note they don’t have to be completely within your “lane” - remember, the goal of your blog posts is to be helpful.

Andy uses an example of an accounting firm and lists questions that their potential clients may have. And then he goes on:

As you make this list, leave four or five lines between items. You’re going to take each question and translate it into four potential blog post topics. Those four topic types are: list, how to, curated, and “newsjacking"

He then goes on to describe each of the four types:

List-style blog topic: Readers love these kinds of posts because they can quickly pick up some very tangible ideas to help with their situation. You see this type all over the web “11 reasons, ideas, techniques to do, avoid, profit from… something.” On the question of avoiding tax expenses, you can see how this would work “7 little-known tax savings opportunities for small businesses” or similar.

“How-to” blog topic: pretty self-explanatory. This is perhaps the first type of post you think to write, and it can be intimidating. First of all, you may get stuck thinking it’s just too complex to explain how to do some aspect of your job. Secondly, you may wonder why you’d want to do that in the first place! After all, your clients pay you for this service -- why would you offer it in a blog post for free? ( I address that line of thinking here.)

What he or she is after is a solution to a simple problem, not an instruction manual in how to be you. Back to the tax question example, a blog post might go down one simple path like “How to organize your business expenses so your accountant can maximize your tax savings.”

Curated blog topic: one of the most overlooked post types. This is a great one to pull out when you’re really struggling to find inspiration to write something original. Simply research other material already online that deals with the same issue. I don’t recommend you pick out what a direct competitor has published, because you’ll need to link to and attribute the source. There’s no need to send your visitors to a competitor simply because your writing juices aren’t flowing! Great sources of material are large (expensive) firms that your ideal clients wouldn’t hire or nationally renowned gurus who write a lot, but aren’t necessarily interested in working directly with your firm’s type of client. Here’s what it takes:

Research and select an existing piece of content that would help your reader.

Include a clear reference re: the original author as well as a link.

Write your own introductory paragraph explaining why you felt this would be helpful information.

Copy a bit (a paragraph or two, perhaps) of particularly useful information and offer additional commentary.

Wrap it up with a conclusion and a call-to-action to download your wonderful guide that offers more thorough help! (that’s a topic for another day).

Newsjacking blog topic: What happened in your industry, city, industry you serve, or Hollywood this week? If there is ANY way you can connect it back to the services your firm offers, you’ve got potential to pull together a newsjacking post. Do you want a sliver of the searches people are launching like “[enter famous business here] tax fraud case”? We can do that! Simply write a post “[famous company]’s tax fraud problem and how your business can avoid the same trap.”

This post is an example of a curated blog topic. I used Andy's material (which I attributed to him), as well as a link to his email address, his main website and a direct link to this blog post on his website. I often use curated posts, such as when I use material from "The Art of Manliness" as well as Harvey Mackay. I started out just using excerpts but then I started copying the whole thing. I'm going back to using just excerpts with a link to the original article if the reader would like to read more.

This video (featured in a previous blog post) shows how to newsjack using NextDoor: