By James Chittenden

Blogging is your tool to educate your intended audiences. It also helps with search engine optimization (SEO). Quality of blogs runs a wide gamut, as most small business owners write their own. Not everybody can blog like a pro. Besides, many owners fall behind in their blogging goals because, quite simply, they have run out of ideas. Do you need blog ideas?

If you want to be published in the newspaper or a magazine, the barriers are a reporter and editor. If you want to advertise, the barrier is price. There are no such barriers when you have a blog. That is why some are terrible! However, the good news is that you can publish whenever you want.

So, what should we write about? What are some good blog ideas?

Be secure enough to give away free information. That is how you become a thought leader. But what information should you give away free?

Tests

• If you were invited to speak before a crowd of people in your industry and would cover it during your presentation, blog about it.
• You are at a business cocktail party and somebody asks light, general questions about your business. You don’t mind answering right then and there. Blog about it.
• A friend calls you for advice in general terms about a problem that your business solves. Blog about that.

What not to do

• Don’t talk to your audience like they are less than adults. Example: “Financial Management Tips”, then one of the tips is “Don’t Spend More Than You Earn”. Your readers are looking for greater substance than they received as 6^th graders. Such articles are as satisfying as baby food. Provide substantive information.
• Don’t focus only on SEO. Search engines reward relevance. Write on subjects that are relevant to your readers.

No matter how well you know your business, you can’t always be as creative as you like. It isn’t easy to stop running your business so that you can blog. Perhaps you need to publish something but are out of ideas. This blog ideas generator from HubSpot could help. Just enter a keyword or two and the ideas will populate. You are now unstuck. You’re welcome.

Happy Blogging.