One of the biggest problem I hear about in business blogging is topic ideas. Yes, even I have that problem now and then. Here’s a way to tackle that one.
Find out about what others want to read. After you talk to your clients or patients or customers, make a few notes as to what the subjects of conversation were. Certainly, you’ll not want to include anything of a personal or confidential nature, but you can probably get an idea from conversation as to what general topics are of great interest to your clients or patients or customers.
If this idea doesn’t work well enough for you, then take a survey. Hand a survey form to your clients/patients/customers before they leave your office/store. Or ask them to take a survey that you’ve posted on your blog or standard website. Use Technorati.com to find potential topics of interest to include in the survey. Structure the survey to reveal the topics that are of greatest interest to your clients or patients. Use a Likert Scale. That’s the “Answer on a scale of 1 to 5″ part that you see on a survey. And then keep this in mind.
In a business blog, you need to serve two masters: your readers, of course, and yourself. If you don’t’ serve your readers, you won’t be read. If you don’t serve yourself, by writing about that in which you are most honestly interested, your posts will becoming boring. Your readers will sense that, and the whole thing will fall apart.
So when the survey results come in, look for a match between the subjects that interest you and those that interest them. Focus on those areas of confluence. Don’t deviate until you take another survey revealing different areas of common interest.
